


Born Under Punches

by quondam



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-17 06:08:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28969599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quondam/pseuds/quondam
Summary: Life doesn't come easy to Shepard after the war, and she finds herself adrift, alone and far from home.
Relationships: Female Shepard/Garrus Vakarian
Comments: 50
Kudos: 64





	1. Take a look at these hands.

The life she used to was more like a dream than anything else. A dream that felt familiar, but every day faded more and more around the edges until one day she wasn’t sure of the details anymore. It was like deja vu, almost; you passed something in the street and that was that, you were somewhere else, a million miles away for the blink of an eye.

The scent and sound of sizzling meat on a spit in an alley on Omega drew her back to an Armistice day celebration on a neighbor’s farm when she was a girl, wind catching her long hair in a tangle it took all night for her mother to comb out. Gravel underfoot, causing an uneven gait, was just what she needed for the vague sensation of solid ground giving way beneath her, falling and toppling on Tuchanka while a Thresher Maw shook below. Even a satisfied sigh from one of her current companions as he slipped from his armor sent a shiver down her spine to the tips of her toes, the ghost of a turian purring with deep contentedness in her bed as she wiped him from the corner of her mouth. _Come here, Shepard._

And then they were gone just as quick, dumping her back in the present to a life that only barely resembled the one she’d had before. There was a ship, a crew, and mission details just as vague as any prior. The only difference was now Shepard wore no badge of ownership on her sleeve.

It was good, too, because certainly someone would’ve fought her when she’d said she was going to Camala, had tracked her last lead there, and she was certain—absolutely certain—this time, that this was where she found what she’d been looking for.

And Jesus, she’d spent enough time looking. Her whole damn life, it felt like, and to finally have what she wanted in her hands…

It had been a slow burn to get there, and truth be told, she hadn’t thought it would bear fruit in the end. Dead from an infection, betrayed by his men, perhaps even blown to bits in the Bahak system—they’d all been possibilities more likely than the one that ended with him still living and breathing decades later.

Instead, she’d found him on Camala like the scum he was, trying to take advantage of those old eezo mines that had made that place so desirable before the population has been decimated—no, decimated didn’t come close—by the reapers. She shouldn’t have expected more from him, in fact it was probably a step up. Slaver turned opportunistic entrepreneur.

He’d gotten greedy, though, had made a little too many credits for himself and burned a few too many men in the process. They’d been eager to give him up in the end, and it had been for Shepard’s benefit. In his compound, they’d found the guards unprepared by their entrance, not that a handful of batarians were much work for the three of them. She’d faced worse—on her own, even—and as they cleared room by room, her rage—bottled up for years now, decades—only grew hotter.

 _Fight harder,_ she wanted to scream at them. _I’ve come this far, make me earn it._

Her heart barely raced these days in the way it had long ago, a nervous fear thrumming through her then. She needed more and more to get that adrenaline going.

They found him on one of the lowest levels. Older than she thought, not that she’d ever seen him. He hadn’t been the one that had done the killing—well, he probably had, just not her family—but he had been the one calling the shots. The few that had done it, they’d never be known, and probably didn’t even remember themselves. It was him she’d have to find peace with, and Shepard, she couldn’t wait to see what it felt like to finally no longer carry unfinished business.

There were other men in the room, but she only had eyes for her target, and allowed her companions to deal with the rest. A shot to the right hand first, precision with a pistol, to knock the gun he’d drawn. Another to a knee, a third to the other. Shepard crossed the room directly.

She’d dreamt of this day and the words she’d say. _Do you know my face?_ She’d wanted to ask. He would, she had no doubt, but he’d know her from the story of Torfan or the shit in Bahak, not from where she’d truly meant. _How many lives have you ruined?_ But he wouldn’t know, wouldn’t have ever kept count, and if he did, he wouldn’t have seen humans as worthy of living anyhow, just points of pride. _I killed every batarian on Torfan thinking of you,_ and she had, even when she probably should’ve pulled her unit back, even when it had cost her a couple more lives of her men to take a dozen more of theirs. _I’d have let the Bahak system go even without the reapers,_ she’d have enjoyed saying. It had taken her some time while under Alliance captivity the first time to feign remorse for the lives lost.

Words would never be enough, though. They were hollow and useless.

Shepard merely approached her target where he laid on the ground, the sound of gunfire and beating fists in the background. She pulled the helmet from her head, letting the loud smack of it on the floor resonate in the room, both for him to gain sight of her with all four eyes and so she didn’t miss a damn thing.

“Shepard,” he said, and she smiled. Good. He understood, then.

She dropped down, armor and all, full weight of her seated on his upper chest while her knees pressed down to the joint of upper arm and shoulder, restraining him. He squirmed beneath her, both his bloodied and unbloodied hands grasping blindly at her for purchase anywhere to try to regain the upper hand. There was no throwing her off her task however, and every ragged breath he took grew more and more struggled with her body bearing down on his chest cavity, restricting expansion of his lungs.

“Shh,” she hummed like one might to calm a rabid animal, pulling her knife from the strap on her thigh. Shepard pressed the tip to the corner of an eye socket, simultaneously popping it out and severing the optic nerve and muscles anchoring the eye to the skull altogether. Below her, he screamed and shrieked, the kind of blood-curdling sound that might have haunted her once upon a time, but no longer. Shepard hunched over him and proceeded with her work, two, three, four times, blood pooling beneath his skull.

“You done?” Miranda asked, picking up Shepard’s helmet.

She stood, both sets of eyes tucked away into a small bag she fished from a pouch on her belt, and gave a jerk of her hands, shaking some of the excess blood from her gloves. At her feet, he was still and silent. Dead.  
Miranda’s nose wrinkled distastefully and she simply shook her head.

Their third, a merc named Ian, approached, holstering his gun. “Shit, were we supposed to be taking eyes this whole time?”

“Just his,” and she led them back towards the elevator, riding it up towards the ground level they’d originated from. “I saw a hungry varren outside.”

In the cargo hold, Shepard sprayed a high pressured hose at the pieces of armor scattered across the metal flooring. The water ran red, then brown, and finally clear, as it passed through the drain on the floor. There’d been someone who had done this for her in her last life.

Ian picked up each piece by hand, a trail of water left as he carried them to a rack along one of the walls, hanging each piece to air dry.

“Gotta say,” he drawled, “never thought I’d find a woman holding some aliens’ eyes as irresistible as I did you today.”

Shepard shut the hose off and cast it carelessly aside. Their shoulders brushed as she passed, hanging up her own greaves. “Then you should’ve volunteered to clean up.”

“I’m helping, aren’t I?” He nudged her with the last of it, the large expanse of her breast plate, before adding it to all the rest. “Although I can think of a couple ways I might be of more use…” 

It was his smile that had gotten her the first time, and still his smile that captured her attention again. The grin was never straight, always just slightly pulling more at one corner of his mouth flashing a glimpse of white teeth, the straightest she’d ever seen like before he’d been a merc he’d been a film star or something close to it. Ian knew it, too, and when there was hardly any space between them anymore, so close that their hips touched, he slid a hand around her and palmed her ass. Shepard brushed her fingers across the side of his shaved scalp, then up into the longer lengths of his hair atop his head. In the dim lighting it was nearly black, but if the sun hit it just right she knew it was brown. Chestnut, even. 

He leaned in, his breath hot on her lips, and the elevator door opened.

“I’d say don’t let me interrupt,” Miranda said dryly, and Ian groaned, pulling Shepard in even closer though his mouth dropped to her neck, nipping the skin there in frustration. “But I’d like a word.”

“What now?” Ian answered as Shepard extricated herself from his hold, skin still warm from where he’d touched.

“Not you.” Miranda nodded her head in Shepard’s direction instead. “If you’d please.”

“Later?” He said to Shepard as way of a goodbye, and she only responded with the slightly upward movement of her eyebrows. The smile returned, tugging at the left side of his lips, and Ian retreated, taking his place in the elevator Miranda had just used.

“Having fun?”

A hand swung, a general motion to the slick flooring and damp armor. “Does it look like it?” It wasn’t to what Miranda was referring, but she didn’t push the issue.

“Eyes,” Miranda said abruptly, and leaned herself against a nearby crate, arms crossed over her chest. “That’s a bit far, even for you these days.”

“They don’t think they can get to the afterlife without them,” Shepard explained.

“I know what your intentions were, but there’s a difference between killing someone because they deserve it and torturing them.”

Shepard’s lips pursed, her hands sent to her hips. “They shot my father straight away, nice and quick, but they took their time when it came to my mother and brother. I think he got off easy, all things considered.”

Miranda simply stared, silent. Shepard knew her well enough to know she wasn’t easily swayed to sympathy.

“You looked like you enjoyed it, Shepard.”

She considered the idea for a second, then shrugged a single shoulder. “Maybe I did.”

“Was it everything you hoped for after all this time? I’ve always found the reality never lives up to the anticipation.”

There was something to be said about not working with people who knew you too well. They knew just how to get under your skin, and Miranda, well, she’d literally been under Shepard’s skin more than a few times. Words were easy.

“Yes actually,” she said, her jaw stiff, “it was better.” She could still feel the twitch of the batarian’s body under her as the life left him. She’d killed… how many was it? Thousands, probably—when you left out the incidentals like Bahak—and they’d died mostly from bullets, explosions. There’d been the closer combat kills like Kai Leng, but that had been in the heat of battle, middle of a fight. This one… she’d savored it. She’d hunted him down and had felt him go on the other end of her knife.

Miranda gave a tip of her head. “Right. Well, when you need me, you know where I’ll be.”

Not _if_ , she realized, watching Miranda follow the same footsteps that had brought her in, but _when._

Shepard waited until the elevator had gone and then took the stairs two decks up to the quarters she called her own. They were smaller than the one she used to haunt, and decidedly less luxurious. No fish tank, no cabinet displaying handcrafted models and souvenirs from across the galaxy. She didn’t have those anymore anyway, they were probably boxed up now in a storage unit on Palaven, or maybe their plastic parts recycled and repurposed into a couple of bottles or part of a park bench. What he would’ve done with them or any of her things… she didn’t know anymore.

“Ay, she’s more and more like a ship mother every day,” Ian began when the door shut behind her, but Shepard drowned him out by stepping into the bathroom and running the shower. The water was hot, slowly rising to that near searing flesh temperature she preferred, as she scrubbed out the remnants of dried blood from around her fingernails. Her gloves had been sodden when they’d gotten back; there’d be no cleaning them, she would need replacements altogether.

Shepard rinsed her face with both hands, and then there was the press of another warm body to her back. It was a memory familiar across half her life, and though the feel of him was decidedly human, for just a moment, not even an entire breath, Shepard swore it was plate instead of flesh digging into her skin. She turned, poised to tip her head up to kiss that gnarled mandible, but it was a human jaw she met, a day’s worth of stubble overgrown.

“You’re sweet tonight,” Ian teased, his hand at her cheek then sliding to her throat, an uncomfortable, vulnerable sensation that made her catch her breath until it moved further south to palm her breast. “Sweet, gentle, innocent, Commander Shepard. Inspiration to children across the galaxy,” she moaned, interrupting his words, as his fingers found her nipple, “and whose tits inspired enough wet dreams to really make us earn the name Milky Way.”

“Are you speaking from experience?” She took his cock in hand from where it was hard against her belly, squeezing it in her fist until it elicited the groan of pleasure she was looking for.

“Yes,” he said, only when she eased off ever so slightly, stroking fluidly along the length of him. “I used to wonder what that cunt tasted like,” and he ran his fingers over the thatch of hair and then dipped them into her, testing the waters, so to speak, as he backed her up against the wall and out from under direct spray of the shower head. He slipped his slick fingers into his mouth, then kissed her hard so she could taste herself as well.  
His own enthusiasm was enough to let herself get lost in. He was like alcohol or any one of the many drugs spread across the galaxy—it dulled the rest of the world around her when she was imbibing and shut off the rest of her brain. Shepard gave herself to him eagerly, following his cues as he reached around her to shut the shower off then hoisted her up in his arms. Her legs circled his waist as he carried her out, the two of them still soaked and dripping on their short journey to the rest of the room.

Ian pressed her up against the wall for support and in the meantime slid himself inside her. Their moans came in unison, her finger nails digging into his shoulders as the first few thrusts began. Her shoulder blades burned against the wall just as he eased her down and tugged her with him to the couch where she took point this time, climbing atop his lap. Their bodies rocked together with her in the lead and his mouth desperately alternating between suckling each breast and even leaving patches of broken blood vessels over her skin. His fingers worked between them to build her up with a familiarity he’d earned through practice. Shepard felt herself closing in on orgasm and she knew he could feel it too.

“Come on, Shepard,” he said, biting just a notch beyond gentle on her lower ear lobe.

But she stopped and pushed off him and took him by both hands until he was the one standing now as she kneeled on the couch cushion he’d kept warm for her, bracing herself on the back of the sofa. Ian needed no instruction and without any preamble, buried himself inside her again, fucking her harder than the minutes before.

She shut her eyes this way, shutting off the rest of the world and only allowing herself to feel that rhythmic pounding into her, that nearing crest of her release. Ian found her clitoris once more and that was all she needed to finally usher her over and she cried out, gasping, body tightening and shuddering. 

In that position, Shepard could pretend he was anyone.

And just like a night of drinking, there was the hangover, though that usually took hours to creep in. This regret was more immediate, the hormone surge flushing out of her system and leaving her far worse off than where she’d started. She didn’t cry anymore, not like that first time she’d tried to find solace in another person, but tears lined her eyes as she bit her lip to try to stem them off. Shepard tried to feign the same enthusiasm Ian still operated by, at least until he came grunting, cum released inside her.

He pulled her up again and she mercifully tilted her head so he could kiss her ear, her jaw, her cheek, and then slid out. She could feel the remains of sex already leaking down her thigh.

“I’ll never get tired of that,” he said, his grin spreading wide and Shepard offered a forced facsimile of it before returning to the bathroom to wipe away the mix of semen and her own fluids. She resented it, resented the fresh reminder of just what she’d done and she moved quickly to rid herself of the evidence, even if she knew from experience there’d still be some of the dried residue come morning.

He was in her bed when she came back. That hadn’t always been the case; their first few times he’d gathered his clothes and slunk off with sweat still on his skin, then he’d stayed just to talk and pick her mind about an upcoming planet touchdown. For awhile he’d slept beside her and been gone come morning, a thief in the night. But now… she’d been with him too long. He’d be there when the AM cycle hit like he’d moved on in, using her shower like it was his.

Shepard tugged a tank top on and underwear, sleeping beside him undressed felt far too intimate a thing despite all that they’d just done—and had done in the past. She nudged him through the covers with her foot. He didn’t stir.

“Motherfucker,” she said under her breath and then climbed in, lights auto-dimming as she kept to her side but made no move to lay down for sleep. Instead, she drew up her omnitool, and scrolled through the list of unread messages. One from Aria, another request no doubt. A couple forwards from sources she didn’t recognize, but usually indicated Liara was involved. One, in particular, caught her attention, but she let it go for now, and moved it to a separate folder.

Shepard instead switched gears to browse the extranet for the latest goings on in the galaxy. She skimmed the headlines: a story about a skirmish between Krogan and Salarians over a moon colony, an unprecedented solar storm that had left a distant human colony unreachable, and breaking news about the gruesome murder of a humble businessman that had been working to restore a place for Batarians this side of the galaxy. They talked of justice for his death, and gave a bold list of lies for his accomplishments.

They could spin anything, couldn’t they?

She forwarded the piece to Miranda with the flick of a finger. Beside her, Ian stirred, rolling onto his stomach and letting his hand rest across her thigh. He looked remarkably young when he slept and you could see past the scars that littered him all over. Shepard gently pushed his hand off, hoping not to wake him. He sighed in his sleep, drew his hand under the pillow and continued on, unaware.

Her inbox popped back up easily and Shepard opened the one she’d marked earlier. It was the usual data dump of information she received on a monthly basis, ranging from links to articles from legitimate news outlets to rumors swirling around on less credible sources, from classified documents passed through the hierarchy to even surveillance footage from various different camera feeds. 

It was good to have the Shadowbroker for a friend when it came to snooping, even better when you needed her to make certain things disappear altogether. She hadn’t exactly been stealth on their exit from Camala, she’d walked proud and bold and perhaps a little too fearlessly for someone not wearing a helmet who had a face known all over the galaxy. But a single message to the right account and Shepard knew any camera that had caught sight of her would now turn up nothing, delving her back into what anonymity was afforded.

The search through the information was systematic, starting at the beginning and sifting through it with an expert eye. She knew most of what was there, it was usually just the same story rehashed a hundred times with an author’s opinion worked into the details. It was voyeuristic, no doubt, and she lived for these updates, counting down days and hours until the next. It was wrong, she knew that, but she didn’t care. It was all she had.

A message from Adrien Victus poured onto her screen, and it was like being reunited with an old friend to read his words, even if they weren’t directed to her. He typed with the same voice he spoke with, and this particular exchange was more informal than usual. Adrien asked for a favor, or rather he was giving a heads up in what was to come. He would be requesting Garrus’ addition as senior advisor to the Primarch after a sudden opening in his cabinet. She remembered reading about that now, something about how Osar Reyko was resigning due to an illness, but that hadn’t been the truth underneath; he’d been caught up in a scandal revealing a little too much to an Asari mistress who had been quietly shopping for the best offer. Adrien trusted no one else now, and wanted Garrus at his side.

Her heart swelled for him—she didn’t need to read his reply to know his answer. He would take it without a second thought. He may not have been happy at having his hand forced, but Garrus would take it. Garrus Vakarian, second to the Primarch of Palaven. His father would be proud.

The remainder of the correspondence was casual, like old friends catching up. Victus mentioned Tarquin as he often did, the grief still heavy on him after all this time, and then he inquired about Aurelia, and had Garrus finally asked her to enter into a bond yet? 

She knew about her, of course. Liara had even contacted her personally before she’d received that first mention of the Turian woman in one of those intel briefs, as if hearing it from a friend instead of reading it on a screen would soften the blow.

She shouldn’t have taken it so hard, it wasn’t like she hadn’t fucked a handful of other men by then. It had been crippling, though, despite the role she’d played in all of it, to know that he had moved on. To know that he’d given up.

It had been a selfish wish to want him to still burn a candle for her. Shepard had never denied being selfish and cruel.

Her skin warmed all over, a physical manifestation of her emotional state, and her throat tightened. She clicked through to the next few links and files, and then there Garrus was, a video file captured from a bird’s eye view security camera as the two of them waited for valet. Aurelia leaned in to him, his arm around her, the way Shepard used to when she was halfway blitzed after forgetting she couldn’t drink as hard as she used to.  
She swayed on her feet and Garrus helped her into the vehicle, his hands lingering just so, like he didn’t want to let her go yet. An action that spoke a thousand words. 

Fuck him and fuck her and fuck Victus. Fuck Palaven and Miranda and the god damn Shadowbroker. Fuck the war, the reapers, the Alliance and all they’d done to her. And especially, _especially_ fuck herself.

Tears broke past the barrier, rolling down her cheeks. Her chest ached and she clicked the next one, an official feed from some speech he’d given somewhere. The vid autoplayed, volume quietly singing to life. That voice. She’d almost forgotten what it sounded like. This wasn’t the voice he used to speak to her with, this was the voice she knew from when he’d been at C-Sec. Officer Vakarian, she used to say to tease him sometimes, playfully begging for him to use that officer Vakarian voice to get her going when he undressed her. He’d always obliged, a smile on his face.

“Why d’you always do this to yourself?” Ian mumbled from beside her, making her jump. She hadn’t realized he’d awoken.

Shepard quickly shut the omnitool off altogether, a quick disposal of any evidence, and then she wiped at her face, trying to hide what was there as well.

“Stop torturing yourself over that fucking bird.” Ian rubbed her thigh, like he thought it would bring her comfort, but it was so wildly off the mark. He didn’t know her at all. “If he can’t see what he’s been missing, it’s his loss and my gain.”

Shepard sniffed back mucus.

“Come on, Shep,” and he sat up, tried to brush aside her newest tears for her. “You deserve better.”

“And you think _you’re_ better?” She bit out, incredulous. Shepard shoved at him and stood up, quickly gathering his clothes from where he’d taken them off earlier.

“I wouldn’t be so daft to walk out on you.”

“Don’t.” Her voice raised, she tossed each item like she meant them to go through him, hitting him squarely in the chest. “Don’t presume to know a fucking thing about my relationship with him.”

Ian’s anger grew in direct proportion to her own, naked as he stood up and pulled his briefs on. “Maybe I wouldn’t have to if you’d—“

“Just get out.”

“Are you serious?” He tried to close the distance between them, but Shepard just moved away further, though the close quarters didn’t afford her much room.

“Get the fuck out.”

“You been happy to have me warm your bed for half a year on, and I so much as mention that twat and you’re telling me to go?”

“I told you already: leave.”

Ian backed her up to a corner, each step pushing more and more into her personal space. Shepard set her hand to his chest, holding him at half an arm’s length. It set her into a panicked mode, years of training and experience bubbling under the surface. If the heel of her palm met at just the right angle of his nose…

But he seemed to see something in her then, that wild animal, eyes dilated expression she wore, and he eased up and took a step back. Ian just shook his head and pulled his shirt on. She could breathe now, felt her ribs expand as she heaved deep breaths to replenish the oxygen she’d missed, and yet she didn’t take her eyes off him.

“You’re really out of your fucking mind, Shepard,” he said with a laugh, bitter and angry. “Everyone said it, but I didn’t listen. Told me I was crazy for shacking up with you.”

She swallowed hard over her dry throat and watched him go, lingering in the doorway with his shoes and pants in hand.

“Whatever happened to you—you’re never gonna be right again.” With that, he took his leave.

She never did sleep that night. His words haunted her. _You’re never gonna be right again._ That was why she’d gone, wasn’t it? To fix whatever had been wrong, to force out those demons that followed her around. Only, she hadn’t fixed a damn thing. She’d given into it, unchecked and running rampant.

In her rage, she’d turned that room upside down in the hours that followed. And when it had passed, when she could breathe steady and her hands no longer shook, Shepard simply started her routine in cleaning up, restoring her space to its former state. She folded and refilled her drawers, took a sense of calm from the sensation of a brush over her boots as she polished them up, and showered again.

When she made her way down to Miranda’s room just before the morning cycle kicked on, she was the image of perfection. Her clothes, though no longer technically a uniform, still had that military quality to them, freshly pressed and fitted tight. Her hair was brushed back and perfectly coifed, gathered into a bun at the back of her neck. She knocked twice.

Miranda was up already, as usual.

“We’ll need to be stopping by Omega.”

“Something you need?” She asked, eyes still on her terminal.

“Ian’s going to be leaving.”

She did look up at that, the kind of glance that dripped of _I told you so._ “I did warn you about fraternizing with the help.”

Miranda had, repeatedly, with every new liaison. It didn’t mean Shepard listened any more each time.

“I’ll make the arrangements, then.”

Shepard nodded her thanks and rubbed at her left eye, the vision gone blurry, out of focus for a second.

“Still having problems?”

She blinked rapidly and the cloudiness faded, vision restored to normal.

“Not your finest work,” she said with half a smile, “mostly when I’m tired or I’ve been looking at a screen too long.”

Miranda gave a thoughtful hum. Shepard took a seat on the edge of the counter and allowed Miranda to shine a pen light to her right eye, then the left.

“I’ve actually been meaning to speak to you about some things,” she said, then held up a finger and Shepard knew what she was asking of her. She followed the movement as Miranda watched. “I’m going to be leaving as well, to be with my sister again.”

That had always been an expectation, something lingering in the future. It had taken longer than Shepard had thought, although that didn’t make the news any easier to swallow. The crew on this ship… it was always ever changing, and Shepard hadn’t made many friends among them. Miranda had been her only true friend aboard the vessel.

“The ship is yours if you still want it, of course.”

“I sense a but lingering in the air right now.”

A soft, reserved laugh left the back of Miranda’s throat as she stepped away, and retrieved a small case from her closet.

“But I think I’ve done a disservice by letting you go on like this, Shepard.” Miranda helped tip Shepard’s head back, adding a drop from a bottle to dilate her eye. Shepard winced as the cold liquid touched down. “I admit, I’m thankful for the help you’ve provided in taking care of a few of those last holdouts from Cerberus, and I felt it my duty to accompany you on whatever it was that happened yesterday…”

Shepard had to admit, Miranda was slick. She’d turned her into something of a captive there, letting the conversation proceed as if spontaneous and off the cuff.

“…But you are unwell in a way that I can’t begin to help.”

The light of the room was harsh as the medication took effect, and she squinted at Miranda.

“And further more, I don’t know that you want to be fixed.”

_You’re never gonna be right again._

Miranda offered her a tissue for eyes she didn’t realize were watering.

“I do know that you don’t want to be here. I’ve known that since the moment you arrived, asking me to try my hand at what everyone else had said was hopeless.”

Her right hand flexed and relaxed, then tensed again, feeling the muscles work. The rest, they’d said it was futile, but Miranda had done what only she could. She had hoped that when she felt whole again in body, maybe she’d be whole again in spirit. It turned out those things didn’t go hand in hand.

Miranda steadied her by the chin and raised the digital opthalomoscope to her eye, viewing the screen that captured an image of the interior of her eye.

“I’ve held my tongue all this time, you know. I have my own contacts, even if you have the Shadowbroker’s loyalty. I owed you the courtesy not to pry, though, so I thought I’d be the friend you so desperately need, and lend an ear.”

It didn’t occur to Shepard that Miranda was waiting for her to speak until she looked up expectantly from the datapad where the image and data had been downloaded to.

“I told you the worst of it,” Shepard said simply.

“Not the Alliance. Vakarian.”

She stared down at her hands on her thighs, palms open and empty. “Nothing so dramatic,” she finally said. “There was no big fight, nothing like that. I just… I didn’t let him in like he wanted, like I probably needed, and everything—just trying to live a normal life, pretending like the war hadn’t happened—was just too much. I left to find you and he asked to come with me, but I told him I’d be back. Only, I never went back.”

Miranda had stopped what she was doing, instead focusing her full attention on her.

“When I think about it now… I think he knew I wasn’t going to return even before I did. I can see his face in my head before I left and—“ The words nearly choked her, and she shut her eyes tight to get through it. “—I think he just didn’t know what to do for me anymore.”

Miranda sat beside her, shoulder to shoulder, but made no move to offer comfort beyond that. Sometimes, being reminded that someone else was there was all she needed.

“The things he wanted—I did, I did want them, too. I do still, but after everything… fuck, I don’t know. I messed it up, all of it.” Her head shook and she pressed her knuckles to her eyes. “I don’t feel in control sometimes, like some other part of me takes over and I’m inside just screaming, begging me to stop, begging me to make amends, and I can’t, I just can’t.”

“If you came out of that war unscathed mentally, Shepard, I’d wonder if there was something wrong with you.”

She laughed, quick and short.

“Listen to me,” and Miranda’s tone was stern, like a mother talking to her child. “If you’re still in love with him, then stop this nonsense and go back.”

Go back. How many times had she said that to herself? It’s time now, go back. Just another week, another job, and then I’ll go home. There was always an excuse, and now was no different.

“I burned that bridge a long time ago, he’s moved on. I hurt him too much, and the things I’ve done now…”

“I didn’t know Vakarian as well as you did. We rarely even spoke, other than if we were both fortunate enough to be your ground squad, but I know how he looked at you, there wasn’t anything you could do that he wouldn’t excuse.”

“That was then. Things are… Victus is going to make him his second, and he’s been seeing someone. For awhile now.”

“He hasn’t married her yet,” she answered, and Shepard knew it was meant to be lighthearted, if Miranda could ever express that sentiment.

It had the opposite effect, the twitch of an involuntary smile at the edge of her mouth. Not out of happiness, joy, or even mutual humor. A bitterness, she supposed.

“He can’t, that’s the thing. He’s married already.”

There was the audible sound of Miranda swallowing before she slid from where she sat, returning to the abandoned data pad. Shepard saw her from the periphery, flipping through medical files, comparing and contrasting the past to present to make a diagnosis.

“Your retina’s not detaching, at least,” she said, “I’m afraid time will only tell. Artificial eye’s still an option if it bothers you that much.”

Shepard touched to the scar at her temple, only a small shadow of what the damage had once been. Had she been anywhere else a year ago, with anyone else except Miranda, she would never be able to fire a gun again without proper depth perception. Maybe, the thought crossed her mind, she would’ve been better off if her hand had been forced…

Planting her feet back on the floor, she moved to leave.

“Shepard,” Miranda called, and Shepard turned back to regard her. “When you were on the Citadel, when you’d made your choice like you told me—“

Her side burned with the memory of her injuries, could almost even feel the slick stickiness of blood on her fingertips. The life was leaving her, she’d been sure of it, she just needed a few more steps, another minute. The pain, the loss, the struggle—it would be over, done, finished. She’d sleep finally and the worlds would go on, and oh God she just wanted to put her head down—

“Who did you think of when you thought you were going to die?”

She’d thought of all of them. Her mother, her father, her brother. Ashley and Thane and Kirrahe, the body bags she’d seen on Menae, the corpses that had been desecrated and reanimated by the Reapers. Liara and Miranda and Anderson’s body still and cold somewhere below her. She’d thought of all of it. But last… last she’d thought of Garrus. How she hoped he’d made it, how she hoped he would find the courage to move on, how she knew the grief would eat at him but she hoped he would be strong enough not to let it, how she’d never know his touch again, how she’d never know what a future with him felt like.

Shepard needn’t speak for Miranda to have her answer.

“And if you died tomorrow, would you regret not making it right with him? You once told me I needed to stop spending my life running,” Miranda breathed a weary sigh, “and now it’s your turn.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was something written awhile back that was meant to be part of a larger story dealing with an utterly broken Shepard post-war. I have a number of other passages written for it, but never bothered to tie them all together. I am attempting to do so now.
> 
> Title and chapters from Born Under Punches by Talking Heads.


	2. All I want is to breathe.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The before times. Shepard tries to start anew.

2188.

Shepard had never felt as out of place as she did on the ship out of Ilium. Odd, considering just how unwelcome she had been made to feel all over the galaxy, but she’d been a soldier then and her armor hadn’t always just been for its practical capabilities. It had granted her an air of authority with it, the kind that inspired confidence in herself perhaps even more so than it did to the world around her. If you looked the part, they’d let you do almost anything. 

Civilian clothes were about dissolving into the background. Invisible. Forgettable. It worked, too, except on a vessel bound for Palaven when it was her race and not her clothes that kept strangers’ eyes on her every step. Shepard took ownership of a bench of seats towards the back of the main cabin, and when any of the other passengers failed to take up interest beside her, spread out across the seats in an attempt to find sleep. 

Time hadn’t made sense for awhile, from long before the reapers and war met the galaxy head on, but Shepard still woke from every bout of sleep with a temporary loss of time and space. Where was she? When was she? There had been markers before that had oriented her, like a friendly face or the lack of one altogether. A scar on a mandible had been a grounding detail for longer than she’d cared to admit. This ship had nothing familiar, and that absence meant it took her longer than it should’ve to regain her bearings.

 _Yes, a ship to Palaven. I’ve been here…._ She glanced to her wristwatch, an old fashioned time piece requiring winding that she’d become accustomed to as of late, _…fourteen hours already._

Down in he mess hall—no, a cafeteria, this wasn’t a military ship—a crew member looked up to her, startled. He glanced left and right amongst the packaged goods she couldn’t digest, then back to her with the same bewildered expression.

“Just water,” she said, and his shoulders slumped in relief before he passed her a bottle. Somewhere, hunger pangs gnawed at her stomach, but they were a comfort. A constant companion to remind her she was alive. A pain she could control if she so chose to. One of the few things left.

In the bathroom, Shepard checked each stall and locked the door when she was sure she was on her own. She pulled back the scarf that had been seated around her shoulders and draped over her hair, setting it aside over an adjacent sink, and let the water at hers run until it was warm. There was a mirror, some piece of sheet metal polished until shiny, across the wall and Shepard was diligent in avoiding the reflection. She lathered her left hand with the available soap, a feat not easy without the complement of her right, then washed and rinsed her face as she cupped water in her single palm. A well rehearsed routine by now.

When she was done and dry, she moved to replace the swathe of fabric, only allowing herself the moment’s glance in the mirror to brush strands of hair out of sight. A poor form of anonymity, but it served its purpose.

A bang sounded as a fist met door and Shepard hurried to answer, ignoring the mumbling of particularly colorful language. Even if she didn’t have a translator, she knew _that_ word from some of the deeper parts of Omega that didn’t look so kindly on humans asking questions. The turian pushed past her, an intentional impact of their shoulder to Shepard’s right, and she wasn’t too proud to fully hold back a cry of pain in the aftermath. Tears pooled at the corner of her eyes without her consent and she gripped her upper right arm with the left as though there was any protection she could offer it.

Funny thing, the human body. A limb could sustain such damage to render it near completely useless, a sling binding it close to her body and carrying its weight, and yet while it refused to function, it absolutely did not refuse to feel. It only refused to differentiate good from bad and more often than not, even the gentlest of touches was a dagger, her skin screaming like it had been crushed beneath a boulder. Or a piece of the citadel. _Cut it off,_ they’d suggested. _You’d be better off._

Maybe they’d been right, but she wasn’t ready to let it go just yet. Call her sentimental.

Shepard guarded the right side on the way back to her seat, feeling the heat of the stares along the way. She doesn’t belong here, they said. Then again, she didn’t belong anywhere anymore.

Down on Palaven, she boarded a local shuttle to her final destination, bag in tow. She’d fired a message from a pay-per-megabit terminal back on Ilium and whether or not there was someone waiting for her would determine the efficacy of her short message, if it even had made it to its recipient at all.

“You’re going to burn alive,” an older woman warned as they disembarked the shuttle and it sounded like a threat, “if that’s all you intend on wearing out there.”

“Sorry—translator’s on the fritz,” she said, sidestepping the conversation and stranger entirely.

_This was a mistake. If I wanted to disappear, I came to the wrong place._

She’d never been here, it struck her, as she stood before the floor to ceiling windows overlooking the city in the distance. Menae was as close as she’d ever gotten, and it had been stark. Garrus has told her many times about the damage Palaven had endured when the reapers had arrived. It had been even worse than Earth. Before her, however, there was very much a city standing proud and tall, rising from the ash.

_It’s been longer than I thought._

“Shepard?”

She heard the voice as she turned in its direction. Garrus waited only a few feet off, dressed very much like her in the sense that they both resembled civilians more than soldiers. He took her carefully in his arms without hesitation, cradling her to his chest with a gentleness she’d almost forgotten existed.

“What are you doing here?” She knew how she heard it wasn’t how meant it, but it took the greatest effort to convince herself otherwise. She heard: why did you come here? He meant: why didn’t you let me come get you?

“I’m running away,” Shepard said and pulled from him, nudging her duffel bag with the side of her boot.

His eyes lingered on her just a half of a second too long for her comfort. Once upon a time, she’d lived for those eyes on her, had felt her cheeks warm with blood from just his glance, but they felt heavy now. A burden.

Garrus gathered the bag for her and side by side they headed towards the terminal’s exit.

“You really should have an enviro suit on,” he chastised.

Her fingers brushed over the radiation dosimeter badge clipped to her shirt collar. “I’ll be careful.” She’d thought on it, had compromised with herself to only bring clothing that would at least keep her skin covered and protected, albeit minimally. “I don’t think Cerberus built me without a couple failsafes to keep me from dying of a bad sunburn.”

His objections hung unspoken in the air along with a correction to the way she brushed off just how much his home planet would be trying to harm her for having the boldness to exist there at all. But he also knew that she knew it all already. Of course she knew.

The warmth of that sun was a joy even if she couldn’t feel it directly, only through fabric, and before she slipped into the car, Shepard tipped her head back to feel it on her face.

She’d been lost in observing the unfamiliar world through the passenger side window when Garrus asked, “Do you remember the last car ride we went on?”

That… that had been ages ago, unless there was a vacant space in her head where another memory should have belonged.

“Yes,” she answered and sat up form her slump against the door, glancing to his side of the vehicle. “You were so happy. _I_ was happy.” Her cheeks ached in echo of the smile she wore that entire afternoon, could feel the vibration in her now defunct hand from the recoil of her rifle. Even her stomach remembered the way it had dropped out from under her when he’d made such declarations to her about their exclusivity. She recalled it like it was yesterday.

They arrived to a home outside of the main drag of the city proper when the sun was just starting to set, and while she followed him through the front door, Shepard drank in the details. It was small, but bigger than he would need or want on his own. It was new, too, even smelled like the paint was still wet.

“They must pay you more than I ever did,” she said and pushed the fabric down off her head, letting it hang limp around her shoulders.

“We were getting paid?” Garrus smiled, setting her bag half inside the living room.

She slipped from room to room, taking survey without going too far. “Nevermind,” her own shy smile returned his.

“When I got that message…” he started as he followed, cupping her cheek with his hand so she slowed down, steadied. “I thought someone was fucking with me. Unencrypted and from a public terminal?”

Shepard raised her left arm as part of her explanation, flexed and released her fist. “They took away my omni-tool.”

“We can get you another.”

Her brow furrowed, a crinkling between them, and she shook her head. “I don’t miss it.”

It had been her lifeline once, but not anymore. What would she us it for, anyhow? Urgent messages of weather updates and interplanetary gossip?

“If I’d known they were letting you go, I would’ve come to get you.”

“There wasn’t much warning,” she answered the rehearsed reply of half-truths. “I didn’t want to wait.”

“What did they say?”

Shepard bit the inside of her cheek and gave a quick shake of her head dismissively. “They said 'thank you for your service Commander Shepard, and good luck with retirement.'”

His eyes narrowed when she met them again. “After everything you did… after how they’ve treated you since—“

She palmed his mandible to stop him, just as he’d done to her a moment ago. “If I’m alright with it, then you need to be, too.”

Garrus gave a nod of ascent, signaling his submission.

Shepard rocked up onto the tips of her toes and pressed her mouth to his without warning, an instinct of the past coming through. He responded on impact and it was slow, languid, a warm simmer instead of a burning heat threatening to burn itself out too soon. The taste of his mouth was familiar and it was like scent: transporting her back to each and every time she’d tasted him, smelled him, drank all of him in. It was easy to get lost in any of the hundreds of memories of him sweeter than this, and for a moment she allowed it.

He led her to the bedroom with just the slightest pressure of his fingers on her body and there they undressed one another, though his two hands proved more capable than just her one. Garrus said not a word through the process, not even when it took more than a minute to untangle her clothing from the sling they removed then replaced around her limp arm. There was a hiss of pain, and his mandibles tightened in sympathy, but he followed her lead, offering his aid. Shepard climbed astride him where he sat on the bed when they were both unclothed, and took him inside her.

Their eyes met, and it made her feel much more bare than the lack of clothes did as their bodies rocked together. She was determined to hold that eye contact, if only to stop him from raking his gaze over the rest of her, but when he reached between their bodies and circled a talon around her clitoris with the same ease he’d acquired after all that practice years ago, Shepard’s eyes fell shut. Her head tipped back, lips parted, and she let him take over most of the work. She felt his mouth at her neck, nipping while his tongue lapped, and then cried out, orgasm taking her without warning. Garrus held her through it, whispered words she couldn’t hear over the pound of her pulse in her ears. When she was boneless, he held her close and shifted their collective weight so she was laid on her back below him. It took barely a few thrusts more and then Garrus finished inside, his hot weight draped atop her.

She didn’t realize her tears until he wiped them away, and it only made them worse. Her chest heaved with each sob until every muscle in her body ached from being tense and tight. Garrus pulled out of her and sat up, cradling her naked form in his arms and across his lap. His own body shook just as much as hers while he keened.

He brushed the hair from her face, sticky with sweat and tears. It was longer now than it had ever been and she’d contemplated shearing it off to her memory of it from when they’d last been together, as if that would have somehow made them forget any time had passed at all. She was glad she hadn’t when his fingers carded through it and stroked over her scalp, the repetitive motion a balm to what felt like an open wound.

“I should have stayed with you,” he said when his breathing steadied. Shepard opened watered eyes to look up to him.

“They wouldn’t have let you.”

His head shook. “I should’ve stayed.”

“I told you to leave, to go home,” Shepard reminded him. It was a vague memory, but one she wasn’t able to forget, if only because of the heartbreak she’d found on his face at the time. It had haunted her at night since then, among the other things that met her nearly every time she closed her eyes.

His words were a whisper of a broken record. “I should’ve been with you.”

She moved to sit up and Garrus curled his arm around her back, bearing most of her weight.

“I wanted you to get out before you got tangled in what the Alliance was doing,” she said and ghosted her finger tips along his mandible then the length of his fringe. “You didn’t need to be trapped, too. Please—it’s over. I’m here.” Taking his hand, she placed it to her chest, heart beating beneath the skin. “I’m here.” _Let it go_ , she wanted to scream for him as much as herself. _Let go._

“Come,” she demanded as she laid back down across the bed and he did as he was ordered, the length of him running parallel to her before tugging the blanket over both of them. Shepard folded their hands together and kissed his knuckles, hugging the limb to her chest between her breasts. Close like that, she could even feel his breath on her.

It was Garrus’ eyes that closed first, and in the dark of the room, she watched and waited until he found his sleep before she gave into her own.

Morning was still hours off when she woke with Garrus beside her, the two of them having hardly moved an inch in the night. It never used to be that way—him sleeping long past her—but it was she who had changed and not him, she had to acknowledge. Sleep evaded her at all costs, at least for any real meaningful period of time when the deep restorative type usually came. It was better this way, because in the waking hours she at least had some control of the thoughts that found her.

Shepard pulled her underwear on from where they’d been cast aside on the floor, then all but tip toed from the room, closing the door behind her to shut Garrus within. The rest of the house offered a quiet she wasn’t familiar with. On the Normandy there’d always been the flow of piped in air and thrum of the ship’s inner workings. Planetside, wherever that may have been over the course of her career, there was the creek of cots and snores of fellow soldiers or a local bird singing to greet the morning. And with the Alliance after the war… there had always been footfalls in the hallway or a machine beeping somewhere to tell the others she was still alive.

Here, it was silent. A blink of an eye and the silence brought the sensation of a blast of an explosion around her, followed by the nothing that came after from ear drums burst. She felt herself flinch—then it was over, gone, the memory passing as a compressor in the refrigerator kicked on, pulling her back to the present in a small starter home on Palaven.

There used to be a recovery period to moments like those, but she was well-versed now, continuing on her way as she took another step, greeted by the cold of the floor against the sole of her foot.

The house had little of him in it, and in a way that was exactly what she expected of him. He’d never traveled with much and she’d assumed his apartment on the Citadel had been similarly spartan. A second bedroom, the one that usually would’ve been meant for a child or a guest, contained only a single bed and a closet. What seemed to be set up as a potential office held only storage containers she would have recognized even if they hadn’t been open, their contents on display and spilling out. There was armor, old and new, and a locked weapons crate. Shepard pulled the top garment from a neatly folded stack in a footlocker and drew it to her face, fabric twisting between her fingers as she breathed in that viscerally familiar smell.

Garrus was only a room over; she could have gone there and tucked her head into the curve of his neck to drown in that metallic scent in real time, but alone in that room was an easier thought to contend with. She’d done this once or twice when he’d stayed in her quarters after they had realized they didn’t care who knew where he spent his nights. An errant shirt left behind, kicked under the edge of the bed, had seemed a treasure back then as she’d breathed him in just as she did now. Shepard returned the clothes to the pile, not bothering to fold it before she made her leave.

The idle habit of checking the fridge produced nothing other than the reminder that she was woefully out of place. There wasn’t much for Garrus either, judging by how empty it was, and so she sought out her bag, digging through her belongings for the protein bars stashed away. It was gritty and dense and vaguely resembled the texture of damp cardboard, but she chewed it down if only to solve the rolling nausea in her stomach and the ache in her head.

Garrus approached from the hall, naked and scratching under his fringe. He yawned deep and caught her from behind, nuzzling her ear and back of her neck.

“You’re up early.”

Shepard shrugged a shoulder, talking with her mouth full. “My cycle’s unbelievably fucked up.”

He made a sound something like a snort and released her to fill a mug from a dedicated hot water spout and dumped a spoon of dried leaves into the steaming cup. “I’ve gotten lazy,” he admitted.

She patted his bare stomach, as if there was a softening there the way humans got on extended shore leave. “I can tell.”

Garrus brushed her hand away then raised a brow plate as he strained the leaves from the water. He sipped the tea and watched her. “I put in an order for some levo groceries, should be arriving today. You need it,” he said, and sounded more like Chakwas giving an order. “They couldn’t even keep you fed?”

She stood straighter since the hunch forward only emphasized the curvature of the sharp notches of her spine and shadow of pronounced ribs. There was no deceiving him now, not when he had full view of her without the cushion of loose clothing layers to hide in or the darkness of a bedroom to keep her secrets. The muscle was gone too, and that was what hurt her more. She’d been strong once and taken pride in it. In hand to hand, she could hold her own. Now, she couldn’t fight off a pyjak, even if she’d had use of both arms.

Shepard discarded the uneaten half of the protein bar on the countertop, her stomach soured by the conversation. “My appetite isn’t what it was,” she said defensively.

“You’ll be back to fighting shape.”

It was supposed to be encouraging, but the words felt like barbs in her skin. A reminder of what she was and wouldn’t ever be again. Acid burned at the back of her throat.

“Shepard…” A familiar tone accompanied the way he rubbed soothingly at her back, trying to coax her into something she didn’t want.

“I’m going to take a bath. You have one of those, don’t you?” She was already halfway towards where she swore she saw the bathroom by time her words finished, her skin still warm from the echo of his touch. The door shut quickly behind her and for a second, she thought he’d persist and follow, but his footsteps faded away in the direction of his bedroom.

Shepard sat on the edge of the tub until it filled, easing the sling from her body as she waited, then slid herself under the scalding water. It was heaven, or as close to it as she was going to get. When was the last time she’d taken a bath? There’d been that hot tub in the apartment on the Citadel, but she’d never actually made it in, and baths weren’t exactly standard on military vessels. There had to have been a time somewhere buried in the recesses of her brain, but it was the memory of being a child that called to her as she sunk in, letting herself drift below the surface. Water filled her ears and drowned out the world.

The image of Leviathan flashed behind her eyelids and Shepard sank further, wishing to go straight through the tub and the floor and the dirt and rock, disappearing somewhere deep down below the planet’s crust. As her oxygen depleted, Shepard felt the mimic of multiple sets of hands grabbing at her roughly, hauling her from the warmth of the water and back into the cold. She sat up, gasping and coughing to clear the water that tried to find its way to her lungs even if the sensation was more memory than reality. Garrus knocked at the door.

“Fine,” she said, her cheek resting against the edge of the tub. “I’m fine.”

She stayed like that until the water lost its own warmth and began to steal what little her body had left. Shepard rushed through the motions of lathering herself with whatever utilitarian soap he had in there, something abrasive and not at all formulated for human skin, but soap nonetheless. She didn’t bother with her hair.

Garrus was perched on the edge of the bed, lost in a data pad, when Shepard returned with just a towel wrapped around her. He didn’t look up, and though it was everything she thought she wanted, the absence of it was what made her realize otherwise.

Shepard neared and urged his head up by touching the tips of her fingers beneath his chin.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly.

His mandibles fluttered. A pause. “Why do you treat me like a stranger?”

She hadn’t known him once, had to guess at the tone of his words which had sometimes led to misunderstandings, stutters and stops in conversation, even slowed the building of their friendship. Now, though, now she knew every plate on his face and what each subtle shift meant. She knew just what each movement of mandibles indicated. She knew how the pitch changed in his voice, miraculously carried through the translator. One night long ago she’d even turned it off while he spoke, just to hear him as he did instead of how some software crafted him. Shepard swore she had half understood him despite not knowing the language, just based on all the other subtle clues about him she’d committed to memory.

What his words didn’t need to tell her now was that he was barely holding himself together. There had been less than a handful of times she’d been witness to that before.

“It’s been… a long time, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, but—“

“No, I mean, how long has it been? Since London?”

His head cocked ever so slightly to one side. “You don’t…?”

It was information she knew she could’ve found out easily enough on her own after her release, perhaps it had even been told to her, but it had all seemed meaningless then. What was time with nothing to mark the passage of days?

Garrus stared, mouth just barely open, and she knew he was questioning everything about her sudden reappearance. Maybe, she thought ruefully, he wondered if she was even her at all, or just another clone stashed away for safe keeping with a fresh data dump of memories and thoughts into her brain. She often wondered it, too.

“Almost two years,” he answered finally.

 _Two years._ Her eyes moistened, a lump formed in her throat. She nodded and gritted her teeth as the words settled in. Another pair of years stolen from her again. How fucking old was she now?

Shepard sat beside him, resting her head in her hand, while the other arm hung mostly limp between them.

“I didn’t think it had been that long.” A lie, if she was honest with herself. She hadn’t wanted it to be so, but she had known all along that more time had passed than she’d ever wanted to believe.

He was quiet, and for a moment Shepard truly thought she was about to get away with only the few things that had been said.

“Please,” he pleaded quietly, breaking the silence. “I need to know what happened to you.”

“Why? It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.”

His words were biting, a sharp contrast to his previous tone, and though she knew that sharpness wasn’t directed at her, it was hard to not feel otherwise. “Of course it fucking maters. They—they—they kept you for two years and told us _nothing_ for six months. We thought you were dead! I looked for your body so I could bury you, and they had you the whole time.”

That anger was something she had loved long ago, to know there was someone out there just as angry as her. She still loved him for it now. 

“They acted like they were doing me a favor when they finally let me see you. And when I do, you’re laid up in bed telling me to go, telling me to leave you and go back to Palaven.”

“I told you…” she halfheartedly began, recalling their conversation from the night before.

“What was I supposed to do?” He was up, pacing the floor in front of her. “You wouldn’t have left me. You’ve never left me—and I… I left you.”

Shepard caught his hand, forcing him to pause.

His head shook. “Don’t. Don’t sit here and tell me again how it doesn’t matter or something equally as worthless.”

She felt her mother pull at her blankets in the middle of the night, heard her whisper her last words to her: _run._ Garrus squeezed her hand and Shepard ignored the sensation of ground beneath her bare feet, night air blowing through her hair as she took off, leaving her family behind.

“They wanted to make sure I wasn’t indoctrinated,” her words were spoken with stoicism, a disconnection from the past. She’d honed that skill over a lifetime, first when she’d left Mindoir in the belly of an Alliance ship and some sergeant had asked her what she had seen. Nothing, she’d seen nothing. She’d been too busy hiding like a coward. “They asked me questions.” A hundred, a thousand, a million times someone behind a desk had asked her what she'd seen. On Mindoir. On Torfan. On Aratoht. On the Citadel. Questions they knew the answers to already, usually. Questions they asked enough until she felt less like a human and more like a living, breathing vault that had been witness to the worst the galaxy had to offer. “They ran tests.”

“For two years?” He asked in disbelief.

Shepard released his hand and sighed. “Please. Please let it go.”

“I can’t.”

“You need to.”

Again he repeated, firmer this time. An ultimatum “I can’t.”

“You’re looking to clear your conscience of something you’ve no right to feel guilty over in the first place. Knowing what happened and what didn’t won’t fix that. If I tell you it was nothing, you’ll still find another stone to wear around your neck.”

Garrus pressed both of his hands to the side of her head, fingers mingled amongst her damp hair, forcing her eyes to meet his. It was a mirror almost, despite their difference in species. She swore she could see the same pain she knew from her eyes—the look she’d been avoiding in her reflection everywhere—blinking back at her. If she could take that away for him…

His hold was firm. “You are the only thing in this life that I have ever loved,” he said, and there was no doubt. Despite everything else, it was one of the few things she hadn’t lost faith in. Perhaps the only thing. “And I can’t live not knowing what they did to you when I wasn’t there to protect you.”

She gripped a hand around one of his wrists, squeezing tight enough to cause pain though his face gave no acknowledgement. It was all she could do to fight off that urge—the one that had been growing perhaps all her life, slow and steady though small and manageable, but now had surged unrestricted like some malignant tumor. The urge that left her untethered, overwhelming all other thoughts or notions. It festered inside her chest and her brain, behind her eyes, while the tingling in her finger tips urged her on as she gripped him harder. Anger bubbled underneath her skin, rage and indignation warming her until she felt hot even from the inside. Shepard wanted to push him away, wanted to scream until she made him feel just as she did. Maybe then she wouldn’t feel so fucking alone.

It wasn’t some kindness in her that kept her from spilling the truth that he begged to hear, wroth as she was to admit it. It wasn’t love that made her stop, pushing that unbridled anger down back where it couldn’t hurt anyone but herself. It was fear. It was shame.

Her grip eased and Shepard turned her head slightly into his other hand, kissing his wrist and shutting her eyes for a moment. A deep breath centered her as she found the words. Enough to placate him, not enough to shine a light on the dark spaces inside her he had always been begging to see.

“They thought I might be indoctrinated,” Shepard answered him, her eyes never leaving his. “I can’t say I blame them. There are recordings of me up there, long after I thought my comm link had gone out, and I sound…” A short laugh left her lips as she shook her head. Garrus removed his hands from her head and instead knelt before her as though he a supplicant at her altar, listening in worship. “Out of my mind. I was, probably, between just the exhaustion and blood loss and… everything.”

“You must know something of what happened,” it only occurred to her then that perhaps he didn’t know all that much. She’d recounted the story a thousand times when in custody of the Alliance, it was hard to imagine the events not being part of him like it was her.

“I’ve heard parts,” he answered. “I would have done anything to be with you there.”

“No,” she said quickly, shaking her head vigorously as she leaned forward to kiss his brow. One then the other. “I’ve no doubt in my mind that if you had come with me, you wouldn’t have come out. I barely made it. I still don’t know how. And if I survived all that and woke up to find that I’d lost you,” tears came easy, as they had since she’d arrived on his planet, and she made no effort to wipe them away. They weren’t fake, they weren’t for show. She meant these ones, they were true. “I would not have been able to live with it.” 

Garrus was careful when he took both her hands in each of his own. The fingers of her right returned the faintest of touches to his palm, all she could manage.

“I survived—pretty much the only thing to actually survive that carnage. They were suspicious of it, I suppose. That maybe the reapers weren’t really as gone as their corpses suggested. Maybe I was that trojan horse planted and left behind, just waiting until I had the chance to finish what had already been put into motion.”

Shepard slid from the bed to the floor to be nearer to him, the towel falling slack but she paid no mind to the baring of her flesh. Her forehead grazed his, the two of them in close confidence even without another soul nearby to hear.

“They were not kind,” she volunteered, but did not elaborate. “But I would not have been kind in their place.”

Garrus heaved a weary sigh from deep within, repeating words from earlier. “For two years?”

Her hand slipped around to the base of his skull, applying the slightest pressure that forced his forehead against hers just a little harder. “For two years.”

Once, after she’d found him on Menae and they had rekindled whatever they’d created that night before the Collector base, she’d found a deep reaching kind of comfort in letting him learn her. Not learn in the way he had learned her body—not that she hadn’t taken delight in that—and not in the way the rest of the SR-2 crew had learned how the commander liked to operate. It had been a slow trickle at first, like a faucet drip dripping away all night, as they passed stories between them like some would share a bottle of liquor. Garrus had sipped her right up, and she him. He’d nudged opened that door inside her, only cracked it open just barely, and shined a razor sharp sliver of light into the depths of what she’d kept to herself. It hadn't been much, but it had been a start.

Then she’d gone up to the Citadel to die. Only, she didn’t die. She lived, and what she came back to was so much fucking worse.

Here, two years later, he was nudging it again, begging for more.

And this time... Shepard pushed that damn door shut herself. Sometimes there were things that didn’t deserve to be seen in daylight. Some things needed to be buried deep in the dirt until you couldn’t hear them anymore.

“Someone else stole more of my life from me,” she said instead of any of the thousand things that screamed behind her door, “and I don’t want to let them take any more.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter ended up changing quite a bit from the first draft, but those pieces changed and removed will make appearances in updates to come.


	3. Won't you breathe with me?

It couldn’t be called a truce. A truce implied that a war had been waged, and even on her darkest days, Shepard would never dare call anything between her and Garrus a _war_. There was, however, something like a peace, and with it came a myriad of unspoken promises. From Garrus, he was careful not to touch the boundary she’d crafted around the previous two years. And from Shepard, she promised herself just as much as him, that when she could, she would let him in. Only, she never promised how much.

Perhaps it was not so much of a peace, but a dance. The thing about dances though, was that even the best partners got tired eventually. Everyone had their limit.

Garrus plated dinner for her while his own warmed on the stove. There wasn’t a market for fresh levo on his planet, not like what had been on the Citadel or other well traversed hubs throughout the galaxy where hydroponics had grown levo and dextro alike. Her food was packaged and canned, reconstituted into something resembling what it once was, but Shepard didn’t complain, only gave her thanks as she took the first bite.

She hummed a sound of gratitude. 

“I have to go back to work,” he said as he sat beside her, his own plate touching down on the table. Shepard was already pushing around the food on her plate like a child trying to disguise how little they’d eaten.

“Work, right.” She laughed suddenly, her fork dropped to her plate. “I forgot people had real jobs.” Their lives had been unusual, to say the least, but she remembered a very different version of him working at C-Sec, day in and day out. That man didn’t seem at all like the one she knew now. “What is it you actually do?”

“Some nonsense for the hierarchy. War left a lot of vacancies.”

“Where do they think you’ve been this last week?”

He shrugged a single shoulder. “I told them I had something to take care of and didn’t give them time to say anything in response.”

A smile crept over her lips, a small one kept mostly to herself. Maybe she’d rubbed off on him more than she realized.

“Well, go to work then. I’ll be here… looking through your things for black mail.”

Garrus turned just slightly in his seat to angle himself towards her, his knee brushing the side of her leg. “You do know that me working here was always temporary, don’t you? Just something to keep my mind busy while I waited to be back with you. And now you’re here, so…”

If she still had a ship and a purpose, his declaration would have been welcomed. Downright romantic, even. Now…

“We could go find somewhere nice, settle down. Take it easy for once like we talked about.”

Her stomach lurched. Shepard folded her hand over the back of his with a weak squeeze. “I’ll tell you when it’s time.”

It was tabling the conversation for another day, but he seemed satisfied enough with her answer, and returned to his meal.

“Your dad—” The thought suddenly came to her. She’d nearly forgotten about them altogether. “—and sister. Are they…?”

“Against all odds,” he said. “They’re here, actually.”

There was somewhere deep inside her, like a shriveled old pit in the center of her heart, that had wanted him to say 'No, they didn’t make it.' Nausea rolled through her at just the notion that such a thought had even crossed her mind at all. _What kind of person thinks something like that?_

A jealous person, she knew. A jealous person who wanted someone else to wallow with and be just as miserable as her. A cruel, jealous bitch.

Her voice cracked and she wrapped her good arm around him after scooting her chair in closer. “Good,” she said, and tried to feel if she really meant it. She did, she decided. _I mean it. I have to._ “There needs to be some good for once.”

“They want to meet you.”

“You told them about us?”

“My father and I never had a good relationship, even by turian standards. But now, after everything, we’ve made progress.”

“We’ve got plenty of time,” she said, and even as the words left her mouth, they felt like a lie.

Garrus returned to work a handful of days later, and the house itself felt even more intimidating with her as its sole inhabitant. Too quiet, too empty, too sterile, and more often than not, it reminded her of that space she’d had to herself under Alliance hands.

 _It’s not,_ she told herself when it felt absolutely consuming and crushing. _It’s not the same at all._

In the mornings, as Garrus readied himself, Shepard laid in bed, feigning sleep though she’d been awake for hours past. She could’ve gotten up with him, started with the sunrise, but it was an exercise in futility for her with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Instead, she watched him through his routine as he showered and dressed, heard the clank of spoon on mug as he made tea in the kitchen, and finally returned to her before he left. The mattress sank with his weight as he sat beside her, leaning over to nuzzle her cheek.

“Call if you need anything,” he said with trepidation each time. What did he think of when he spoke? Did he imagine he would arrive home and she’d have disappeared without a trace? Did he think he’d come over to find her dead and lifeless for hours past?

Shepard smiled wide so it read across the whole of her face, offering reassuring comfort to quell his fears. Hers, too. She’d had those errant thoughts from time to time. _Maybe it would be easier if…_

On warm afternoons, she ventured outside the home, but only just, to the small covered patio out back that overlooked dirt and stone. A sound from the plot of land to her right drew her attention, a child playing. The child looked up, wide eyed, like she’d never seen a human before. Maybe she hadn’t, especially out on Palaven.

Shepard looked away, but in the periphery could see the child still watching her. Her hand raised finally, offering the kid a wave like it would scare her off. Although it wasn’t returned, she didn’t scamper back inside to her mother or father, and instead chose to creep closer to the imaginary borderline between the two properties.

“You’re a human,” she said, something of a question.

“Yes,” Shepard confirmed, then with a smile, “I think so.”

The little girl chirped, a sound Shepard had only ever heard from the youth of that species, and the child’s mandibles fluttered in time with the sound. “Why are you here?” It wasn’t laced with the tone of threat, just curiosity.

“My—“ Boyfriend? Partner? “Friend, lives here,” she supplied, settling for the ambiguous and simple answer. “I came to visit.”

She was there the following day, and the next, and it wasn’t long before Shepard was the one peeking through the kitchen window, waiting until the girl emerged to say her hellos. Her name was S’rana, Shepard learned, and she was eight years old.

Somewhere along the way, Shepard decided she should introduce herself to the girl’s parents, lest she be accuse of something untoward with a child she didn’t know on a planet not her own, and so Shepard braved the sun and the fear and knocked on the front door. It was then she learned that S’rana had been living with an aunt and uncle, and they already knew all about the human next door. Shepard supposed she should have seen that one coming given just how much the girl liked to talk, but it saved her a lot of words she wasn’t sure how to string together, so the revelation was a welcomed one.

A cloudy day brought an offering of invitation to the market from S’rana’s aunt, and an acceptance spilled out of her before she could second guess or formulate a reason why she couldn’t, or shouldn’t. It was the first time she’d left the home—really left it more than to venture one house over—and Shepard told herself she was only going to convince herself that she didn’t have to add agoraphobia to her long list of troubles.

There was no hiding out there, Shepard knew. Even If she was covered head to toe in thick armor, her silhouette or height would have never matched that of the natives to the planet, and so she steeled herself against the curious and cruel stares alike. S’rana took her hand and led her about the market stalls, showing Shepard all her favorite things from the brightly colored libari fruit stacked neat and high, to a man selling potted native succulents with prickly edges that changed color depending on the temperature.

It was fascinating to see the world through a child’s eyes. Every moment was an adventure.

S’rana offered a piece of flakey dough from the outside of a pastry filled with a cream-like sweetened protein made from the meat of a local insect. A piece that small wouldn’t be enough to cause harm, so Shepard accepted and partook in the local specialty. The little girl wore a smile so pleased that it made Shepard erupt into one of her own. She’d forgotten a smile could be so overwhelming she could feel the warmth of it through her whole body, numbing her momentarily to all the other things that usually plagued her.

“Why do you wear that?” S’rana asked her, tugging on the fabric of her scarf.

 _I want to be invisible,_ she nearly said in a rare moment of honesty, but it was a burden a child didn’t need to hear or try to understand, so Shepard just took a napkin and helped clean S’rana’s hands. “The sun here will make me sick.” S’rana looked as if she was contemplating the answer, trying to understand how such a thing could be possible, but just nodded in the end.

Shepard returned home with them and a bag of groceries, S’rana nestled into Shepard’s lap in the backseat. It had made her tense at first, but it was easy to settle into, and so she cradled the girl as best she could, feeling her hot breath against the skin of her own neck as S’rana rested her head on Shepard’s shoulder. Why the little girl had chosen her to place that bit of trust into blindly, she didn’t know, but she’d already resolved not to reject it.

Most days, Shepard watched the clock, feeling as though time had impossibly slowed while in her self imposed solitude, but when they parked in the neighbor’s driveway, she knew it was later than she expected. Garrus’ skycar pulled up just as she carried the girl’s weighty body against her hip, only the single arm for support. S’rana wiggled and yawned as she woke from being jostled, and Shepard eased her back down onto her two feet outside the front door.

Shepard playfully pat her short fringe, a similar motion to how one would ruffle a human child’s hair, and bid her goodbye for the evening. S’rana’s aunt had already passed Garrus their groceries when Shepard met him and moved back inside.

There were a million questions she could see spinning around in his head, so she cut him off.

“I don’t know if you like them…” and she pulled out the package of sweets from the top of the bag, setting them on the counter. “They were warm earlier, but not anymore I guess.” The remains of steam clouded up the clear packaging.

“Ciklin?” He wasted no time in retrieving one, his eyes shutting as he savored the first bite. “I haven’t had these since I was a kid.” The reaction reminded her of S’rana, a pure kind of delight, unburdened with anything else. “The insects they make this out of only cycle every few years. They’ve tried growing them in captivity, but the taste is never right.”

While he ate, she worked at putting away the purchases she’d made. They were mostly things she had seen around the house already, with a few odd recommendations from S’rana and her aunt thrown in.

“I didn’t realize you’d met the neighbors,” he said when finished, brushing the crumbs from his fingers.

Shepard simply bobbed her head. “They’ve been kind to me. It’s been nice to have someone to talk to instead of sitting here alone all day.”

“You and the girl…” Garrus trailed off, fishing.

It felt a private thing he was intruding on, an irrational thought.

“I was thinking about your family,” Shepard said instead, “I’d like to meet them if they have the time.”

He perked up at the words, their last conversation put on the back burner to simmer. Garrus caught her by the hand before she could step away and pulled them together, embracing her. “I love you.”

Like S’rana’s smile earlier in the day had caused her to wear her own, Garrus’ joy was similarly infectious. Perhaps it was like giving a gift, where waiting and watching for the receiver’s reaction was its own pleasure returned unto you. She could say a word and bring him happiness, and that alone meant more than any happiness of her own.

“I love you,” Shepard replied. 

There was a tenderness to his face, corners of his eyes crinkling ever so slightly at her words.

How long had it been since she’d said that aloud, directly, without hoping he simply _understood?_ Surely she’d said it since she’d been here—if not when they first laid eyes on each other again—then maybe when he’d been inside her one of the many times since—perhaps at least back when she’d been under Alliance’s hands and told him to leave… No. She hadn’t, had she? He had, he’d held her face in her hands and nearly poured his soul out. _You are the only thing in this life that I’ve ever loved…_ and she had wanted to hurt him, had shut him out, and certainly not returned it.

When had been the last time?

London, she realized. London, putting him back on the Normandy before she went to what was surely to be her grave.

Her chest ached. Ached so much it felt like all of Palaven was collapsing in on her and starving the breath from her lungs. 

“I love you,” she said again, urgently this time, desperate to be sure that he knew. “I love you—you must know that.” 

Garrus hummed from somewhere deep within, something more akin to a cat purring than any sound a human could make. He nodded.

Shepard nearly threw herself at him, felt his arms cross at her back, his mandible caught in her hair.

“I’ve always known, but it is nice to hear it.”

Beside him in bed later that night, Shepard ghosted her fingers over the back of his cowl. He rolled over and turned in her direction, eyes still shut.

“Hmm?” 

They were alone, and yet Shepard kept her words a whisper in the dark.

“The people next door, you know them?”

It earned her a huff of air and a single opened eye. “I met them when they moved in last year, helped them out with some paper work when they took in the girl.”

Shepard moved to lay on her back and drew her hand to rest on her stomach idly as she watched the ceiling rather than meet his gaze. Light filtered in around the edges of the screens that had been drawn over the window, casting shapes up above.

“S’rana’s parents—they’re dead, then?”

He stirred only slightly, inching closer to her until various points of his body pressed gently against her. His warmth radiated against her cool skin.

“Yes.”

“I thought so,” a beat, then, “reapers?”

Garrus’ hand slid over, palming the back of her hand, their fingers folding together to make a fist.

“Her uncle said the girl wandered for days until someone found her half starved, then it took until the war was over for them to find out she was alive at all.”

Her eyes shut tight, teeth grinding so hard it made her jaw hurt. Shepard rolled to her side, withdrawing from him. Their hands separated and she pulled hers back to her chest, holding it close.

On Mindoir, she hadn’t wandered. Shepard had been too old to not understand exactly what was happening, and too scared to dare leave where she’d hid. It had been days of sitting in her own stink and filth before the sounds—the ones that didn’t belong in a place like Mindoir, at least the version of it she’d grown up in—had stopped and she’d climbed out of that grain silo with unsteady legs that carried her back to the only place she knew to go: home. Her desperate hunger had guided her through the field of charred wheat still smoldering in spots, to the open back door to the kitchen. She’d been half out of her mind with thirst and shock, she hadn’t noticed a thing around her until her bare feet felt the sticky wetness of a drying pool of—

She shuddered. 

That poor girl. S’rana had been so young, she probably wouldn’t even remember her parents at all.

Then again… she’d been sixteen, and she could hardly recall hers either. Maybe S’rana’s age was a mercy, then.

“Are you alright?” Garrus asked after a moment.

“No,” she answered. 

Behind her, he moved in closer again, their bodies fitting together as he wrapped an arm over her.

“Tell me about them,” he said, and it was no surprise that he always seemed to know exactly what she was thinking about. “What were your parents’ names?”

The darkness felt a comforting confessional of sorts. “Anna, Joseph. I—I had a brother. Stephen.”

“I didn’t know you had any siblings,” Garrus said.

Somewhere on the extranet, if one was inclined to look for it, there surely existed a list of the names of those who had perished over those days on Mindoir. Cerberus—and by extension Miranda—would have known, probably even had the official accounting of her testimony she’d given to the Alliance, all filed under useful information to try to understand and influence her psyche. She’d read the Shadowbroker’s dossiers on all her companions and could only begin to imagine the file size on the one about her. But what of her past had Shepard ever talked about with anyone, even Garrus? Hardly a thing.

“My father liked to pretend we were in one of those old stories from Earth: pioneers settling the wild west. It wasn’t like that though; my parents both had studied industrial farming and thought Mindoir would be their big chance—a chance to prove they could grow and harvest on a new planet, yes, but also protect the land rather than destroy it in the process like had been done to so much of Earth. A better way…”

Settled in front of the mirror, Shepard found herself thinking back on the things she had spoken about to Garrus in the cover of night. That image reflected back at her—both familiar and not at the same time—was a living reminder of the time that had passed. It was written into the lines of her face: the wrinkles around her mouth, the small slivers carved at the corners of her eyes, the darkened circles under them.

_Is this what my mother looked like? By my age, she’d left Earth, had two children…_

She’d spent much of the quiet moments of the last days trying to think of her, any image at all. While the context of memories existed, if she tried to conjure up the face of the woman who bore her, it was blank. A fuzzy picture out of focus.

_She was my mother. How could I forget?_

Garrus stepped into the bathroom as Shepard tried to steady her out of practice left hand in painting her face, fading away the lines that time had etched into her.

“I used to love watching you do this,” he said, catching sight of her in the mirror.

“I used to love having a right hand to do it with,” Shepard groused, wiping away the black ink from her eyelid, another failed attempt.

“There’s nothing they can do for your arm?”

Shepard rolled her good shoulder and started over, drawing the line along her eyelashes. It wasn’t perfect, but the best attempt yet. She tried for the other eye, settling on more of a sister than a twin of a line when she was done. “They reattached the nerves but it still isn’t right. And the muscles there were all completely torn for so long—they tried to put them back together but I get the picture that it’s kind of just chopped meat in there after everything.”

Garrus picked up the mess of towels and clothing alike from the floor as he moved about. “You didn’t want a prosthetic?”

“They didn’t offer.” She applied the mascara, a long awaited import from another planet, and when she looked in the mirror then, the image wasn’t nearly as startling. “Half of me is synthetic joints and bones anyway. At what point am I more machine than human?”

He didn’t grace her rhetorical question with an answer. “What about Miranda? She brought you back from the dead, you can’t tell me she can’t fix an arm.”

Miranda…she’d thought about her once or twice or a thousand times. Considering the fact that she’d had to fight off a damn clone of herself, however, Shepard had let that idea remain in her head.

“Have you ever heard of the Ship of Theseus? It was an old thought experiment from ancient Earth; you probably have something comparable here, I’d imagine.”

“A thought experiment… about a ship?”

The gentlest of smiles graced her lips at his questioning tone, then continued as she left for the bedroom with him in tow.

“The basic idea is… you have something. In this case, a ship. A famous ship, and when I say ship I don’t mean a spaceship, I mean, you know, a boat. Well, it doesn’t matter—but, it’s a wooden boat of legend and great importance that is kept and maintained, and when some piece of it rots or breaks, that part is replaced.” Shepard slipped her towel off and pulled her underwear on, then moved for the stretch fabric of her bra. Garrus helped her maneuver it on as she spoke.

“Eventually, over time, when enough things are replaced, there’s nothing left of that boat that originally existed at all. It looks just like the original, of course, but nothing about it is.” She stopped then, at the closet, and turned back around to look at him. “The question is, is that ship really the ship of Theseus anymore? And if it isn’t, what is it? What makes something anything at all?”

He was getting himself dressed as he considered her words. “What’s the answer?”

“There isn’t one. Everyone has their own idea of what identity really is.”

“Well, what do you think about it?”

The fingers on her right hand flexed just barely, her elbow offering the slightest of movements. As always, the limb felt like dead weight from the shoulder on down, heavy. Her eyes stared off into the distance, at nothing at all.

“I think that maybe it looks like the original ship, but Theseus never walked over the planks on that deck, those sails never caught wind and carried him across the sea. It’s a copy, a reproduction. It’s just a fraud hiding in plain sight.”

He was fully dressed by time her eyes came back to focus. Garrus settled his hands on both of her shoulders.

“But you’re not a _ship,_ Shepard.”

The phrase was so absurd, that despite the maudlin turn the conversation had taken, Shepard and Garrus both laughed together.

“No, I suppose I’m not.”

They were late for dinner, and it was unexpectedly Shepard fretting over the time rather than Garrus, as if somehow they could forgive her for being human instead of turian, but certainly couldn’t overlook such rudeness as to be ten minutes late to an agreed upon meeting time. Despite the worries, his family was more welcoming than she ever thought they would be, at least not his father, given all the things Garrus had always said about him. War had that effect on people, she supposed. 

Garrus was alight in their presence and it had a contagious quality. She smiled and laughed more, her body thrumming in only the way that good company provided. The last time she’d felt it had been at the party they’d thrown on the Citadel, surrounded by the friends that had become something of a family unto themselves.

She let him be the star for the evening, telling stories of their travels that she knew just as well as him, only adding in snippets of commentary to color the story a little bit more or to make his feats truly shine in the retelling. Castis had never approved of Garrus abandoning his duty to abscond off with her, but it seemed that time had changed that tune. There was pride there, apparent even without the speaking of a single word.

When his sister and father were otherwise occupied with him, talking of long lost friends and family, a quiet moment left Shepard to her thoughts, imagining her own parents were at the table beside them. Her father would be all grey by then, skin darkened from a lifetime of work in the sun. Like the thought of her mother earlier, though, Shepard wasn’t sure the picture she painted was exactly true to life. Were his eyes green or blue?

Despite her quiet dreams, she knew they wouldn’t have fit in there. Her parents were educated people, with more than a pair of degrees under their belts, but it was hard to imagine Garrus’ father looking at them as little more than glorified terraformers who dared to stray from their own solar system on a foolhearted dream. Quaint, maybe, at best. She’d been barely more than a baby during the First Contact War, but her parents had lived through some of it, and she wondered now if her parents would have been horrified at the thought of their daughter choosing to abandon any hope of what they would have considered a normal life to pair herself with a turian. They’d never said much on the subject, the Shepards were much more of a _if you don’t have anything nice to say…_ type of people, but she’d grown up hearing the things the other colonists had said under their breath the few times a turian ship had passed through. It was hard to imagine her parents wouldn’t have felt the same way. Tensions between their two species had been high back then, not that they faired that much better years later.

It was a wishful thing to imagine, but even in her dreaming, Shepard had to acknowledge there didn’t seem to be any kind of path of events that would have led her parents to that table beside them. 

If the batarians had passed Mindoir by in favor of another colony, or even just chosen a landing site on the other side of the planet, Shepard would never have left. She wouldn’t have signed away her life to the Alliance and—even removing the threat of reapers from the equation completely—she and Garrus would never have crossed paths. He would still be working at C-Sec, and she… she would surely be married, a couple of kids underfoot. Simple, maybe, but happy, hopefully. 

It was a sobering realization, to know that if someone had granted her a wish—and she undoubtedly without a second thought would have asked for her family to survive that horror—this man beside her would never have known her at all. Had she, in some strange way, traded the lives of her family in order to be with him? And if that wish were possible, would she be able to give him up in order to have them back?

Shepard took a drink of the wine Solana had imported from off world just for her and the occasion. It wasn’t what she usually drank, but the thought had touched her enough to commit to drinking a glass or two in appreciation. Now, she drank deep, finishing her glass and pouring herself another generously.

Garrus slid his hand to her thigh, a squeeze to remind her of his presence, and Shepard folded herself back into the conversation happening beside her, quarantining those earlier thoughts.

When they arrived home, Garrus was still thrumming with the energy of the evening. He stepped a little lighter, moved a little smoother, and kissed her a little harder. They were also both a little bit drunk. 

The evening had gone well, then. She’d had an inkling, at least, when his father had suddenly hugged her in a way she wasn’t prepared for, a private whisper of thank you for bringing his son home to him.

Garrus spread her out on couch and pulled the leggings and underwear down from beneath the short shapeless sheath dress she’d worn, hiking the skirt up to her waist. There was no hesitation as he lapped at her cunt, his arm around her hip as he tugged her closer and closer to the edge of her seat, slipping a leg over his shoulder. It was intoxicating, more so than even the alcohol she’d had, and Shepard dragged her fingers over his fringe, urging him in closer to her center.

His attention to detail pushed her along, though there was a give and take, a teasing quality to it. Every time she found herself close, the soft needy pants from her throat growing louder and uncontrolled in anticipation, he withdrew, letting that building urge recede. It was infuriating and incredible at the same time, but before she could voice a complaint, he returned to his work, letting her edge closer and closer before the pattern repeated.

“Garrus,” she moaned and half whined, and Shepard could feel him laughing, mandibles flickering against her thigh.

He gave in finally, relentless as fingers spread her wide and his tongue finished her off, not easing back even after she’d come once, encouraging the aftershock to guide her into that second orgasm he had become good at coaxing out of her body.

Shepard pulled him up to her and kissed his slick mouth, tasting herself on him.

“We should marry—that’s the word you use, isn’t it?” He said when they parted to breathe, his eyes searching hers for an answer.

She wasn’t sure of her ears at first, but his solemn expression confirmed what she’d thought she heard. More than anything, Shepard wanted to make him happy, keep him happy, and her lips found one word. Just not the one he sought.

“Why?”

“Because we love each other,” he said, as though it was a fact she wasn’t yet aware of. “Because I’ve wanted to for the longest—because I was too scared to ask you years ago and I don’t want to waste any more time.”

She’d heard it in his voice on the presidium. If he’d asked then, she would have said yes without any hesitation. Now though… she tried to wake herself up—as if there were parts of her sleeping or parts lost in the wind she had to gather up to make herself whole—to feel what he was truly asking of her. She’d been in a haze for so long now.

Her hand trembled as she touched her fingers to his chest, feeling the firmness of his plates underneath. It was too thick to feel the pulse of his heart beat, but hers pumped so loud she swore she could even hear it in her ears and feel it in her temple. _We love each other, we do._

Shepard’s answer came in the form of a nod first, and before she could get a word out, Garrus had pulled her in close, laughing with joy.

“Alright,” she laughed too, “okay. I’ll marry you.”


	4. I'm not a drowning man

They didn’t wait.

There’d been _talk_ of waiting. Garrus had made a fair argument that bringing together their old crew for such a thing seemed only right, given the common history they’d all shared. Part of her had even wanted to agree. The other part, however, had felt a skin crawling sensation at just the mention. It had been hard enough to avoid Garrus’ questions over what had happened since then, and in her head she pictured a barrage of pitying glances, not unlike the ones that stared back at her in every mirror, when they saw what was left of who she had been. Shepard had kissed him sweetly to stymie the discussion, and instead asked not to prolong what they’d already waited long enough for.

So, they didn’t wait.

It meant hopping a shuttle to Cipritine after they’d been turned away at the local clerk on account of the fact that filing for a bond between a turian, and well, _anything_ else, required authority the magistrate said she wasn’t sure she had. So they left for the capital with nothing more than what they wore and the hope that what they sought was even possible at all. Garrus, though, had promised her their journey would bear fruit.

She just hadn’t expected that the theoretical fruit would be in the form of Adrien Victus.

“Vakarian,” the older man said, greeting Garrus warmly when his assistant let them into the Primarch’s suite. His eyes moved to her then, his facial plates and mandibles shifting wide, startled. He was frozen where he stood. “Shepard?” _Is he seeing a ghost? Or just the person who reminds him of a different ghost altogether?_ Adrien’s eyes flickered back to Garrus.

Beside her, Garrus gave a single shake of his head in response, something unspoken passing between them that set Adrien’s shoulders at ease. She’d missed two years, of that she had been aware, but the familiar tone in which Adrien spoke Garrus’ name was different than what had existed back on the SR-2. A tale for another time, she supposed.

“You’ve certainly upgraded your office from the Normandy,” she said instead of a greeting, but moved to meet him anyway. She offered her hand and he took it, but then Victus pulled her in, clapping her on the back. 

“You should have told me when you arrived, we would have set something up. The hierarchy would be honored to receive you here.”

Shepard shook her head, waving him off. “I’m not here on official business. I’m—“ her lips pursed, a glance given to Garrus as he joined them. “—Retired, I guess you could say.”

“Though we do have, ah, different _business_ ,” Garrus added. “I’m not sure if you’re the man we’re looking for, but I thought you might be at least able to steer us in the right direction.”

“Whatever it is you’re going to ask for, I’m inclined to grant it, given the debt that I—we—owe you, Shepard.”

“Please—don’t. There is no debt.”

He looked as if he were to object, but thought better of it, acquiescing. “Then I’d grant it simply on account of _friendship_. What can I do for you?”

It turned out that Victus, too, wasn’t sure on the paperwork side of all of it. Interspecies marriages had been something seen more often on the Citadel or off planet, where other governing bodies had always been the ones to deal with such formalities. Of course, he told them, there were always problems: someone, by design or just good old incompetence, forgot to file the documents with the Citadel’s centralized system or didn’t bother to shuffle it off to each party’s home world. Such mistakes often led to couples unable to apply for spousal benefits back home, while their joining had been made official a solar system over. Or in the more rare cases, Adrien had told them, with much amusement in his voice as he refused to name names, of one such turian general that had bonded himself near thirty times over with a lover on every planet he’d traveled to, always making sure the paperwork of import was never received back home.

Regardless, Victus had only to make a few phone calls to produce a judge that greeted him more like a friend than a colleague, while his assistant worked as something halfway between a scribe and notary.

There weren’t saccharine words of promise and forever repeated like in the vids or that one backyard wedding she’d attended as a child, only a handful of affirmations given to a series of questions mostly to ensure neither party was under any undue pressure to tie themselves to the other. Victus had tried, and failed, to stifle a laugh.

And after all the fuss, it ended with nothing more than a biometric scan of both of their palms and a hastily scrawled signature of each of their names.

“That’s it?” Shepard asked, “it’s done?”

Victus nodded, motioning to his assistant whom had been charged with finalizing their documents. “Aurelia will have the records sent back to Earth, for your people to record it as well.”

Her fingers tightened in his where they’d been folded together since the informal process had begun. Affection, for Shepard, had always been delivered in measured doses and best kept to private moments or dark and quiet corners when that elusive privacy could not be found. How many times had she kissed him in plain and obvious sight of others? How many times had she let the world really know what he meant to her—and her to him? She’d been happy to share herself with him behind closed doors while hardly even allowing their tight knit crew to catch glimpses of them together on their own ship, all done in the name of professionalism, or that was what she told herself. Maybe she’d just been a bit of a coward.

There was no hiding here, however, even with only a trio of others to bear witness. His hand found its home cupping her jaw and it was second nature for her to lean in to it. Garrus, it seemed quite the contrary, had no trouble putting his affection on display.

Her eyes shut for a moment to steel herself. _Now or never_. Shepard rocked up onto her toes and pressed her mouth to his. She wasn’t sure she even remembered what it was like to kiss a human anymore, she’d spent so much time thinking about kissing him. When she moved to pull back just the slightest, he did not allow her to relent, and then she was smiling into the kiss, laughing even as tears broke free from the corners of her eyes. Her fingers slipped from his hand to clutch at the bulk of him, clinging her body to his own as though there was an active threat to pull them apart.

Their kiss broke and then he was circling his arms about her. Still she laughed, still she cried.

“Congratulations,” Victus offered and Shepard wiped at her face desperately, trying to find some composure.

“ _Thank you_ ,” Garrus said for the both of them. She felt nearly dissolved into him with the way they wrapped themselves around one another, a shared warmth between them. Garrus stroked her hair away from her wet face and it was perhaps the gentlest, sweetest touch she’d ever had. Or likely ever would.

“I’m yours as long as you’ll have me,” Shepard said, quiet.

“Forever then. I’ll have you forever.”

The words were laced with such conviction she didn’t just hear the words in her ears, she felt them in her bones, in her stomach, deep in the clenching of her chest, every breath that filled up her lungs and sustained her very life.

Both of the other turians bid their goodbyes and congratulations as they took their leave, and soon enough it was only Victus left with them once more. Despite the fact that the last time the three of them had been in a room together had been under very different circumstances, the war couldn’t have felt further away than it did right then.

“I was bonded once,” Victus started, “though it feels a life time ago now. These should be the happiest days of your lives. Take some time away, enjoy one another. Spirits know you both deserve it.”

The star the locals called Teyolia baked down on her, the sand beneath radiating an equal warmth, working Shepard to that precipice of heat induced slumber. "Do you know how to swim?" she asked.

“To save my life? Yes—probably.” Garrus stared out over the expanse of beach before them and the blue ocean that lay even beyond that, the constant ebb and flow of wave rolling in and back out. They’d chosen that particular spot earlier in the day’s cycle, a place far enough away from the others that would inevitably trickle in as the system’s star tracked its way across the sky, but perched just on something of a crest of sand to enjoy the view. “Turians don’t exactly swim for fun. We’re not the most buoyant species.”

Reaching beyond the edge of the blanket, she fisted a handful of sand and tossed it at his side. “Then _why_ would you suggest we come to Nevos?”

Garrus retaliated, scattering a much larger palm of sand across her and their belongings around them. Shepard yelped, then laughed, sitting up as she spit the sand from her mouth.

“I can still appreciate it and enjoy myself without having a near drowning experience,” he answered, then brushed the sand from her cheeks and nose, his finger taking a slow and deliberate stroke over her skin. She’d have blushed, if her face wasn’t already flushed with the beginnings of a sunburn.

“I was a good swimmer,” she volunteered, watching the groups they shared the wide swathe of beach with. An asari and human woman swam out beyond the shallow sand bars, headed for a series of large rocks that broke the biggest of incoming swells of waves, and fought amongst themselves in who could scale to the top quickest. The pair laughed, hollering so loud it could be heard from even where Shepard sat, as their wet hands and feet slipped on slick stone. The fingers on Shepard’s right arm twitched where the limb was bound close against her. “My mother taught me. On the hottest days, I used to swim until I had nothing left in me and barely made it back to shore.”

The queen of the castle, the first to reach the top of that pillar of rock, hurled herself back into the water, splashing amongst the waves in celebration. A gust of wind caught Shepard’s hair, even brought the slightest spray of seawater against her cheeks, and if she blinked long enough, she swore she could feel herself climbing that rock too, that heady rush as she tossed herself back into the water below. In her dreams, she always had two hands to use as she pleased. 

Garrus gave her thigh a squeeze, then stood and took her by the good arm to haul her to her feet. She went willingly with him to the water’s edge, cool water rinsing her ankles then her thighs and abdomen the further they waded out. The waves were mild but still she felt that push and pull of the water, rocking her like she was little more than whatever passed for seagrass on Nevos.

“Be careful,” she lightheartedly warned him when they moved deeper, “I’m not saving you when you get swept out to sea. You’d panic and drown us both.”

“You’re the kindest mate anyone could ask for,” he said, both palms splashing a curtain of salty water in her direction. Shepard dunked below into a coming wave to avoid his attack, then resurfaced.

“You really should have researched some vows,” she admonished, moving closer, then hooked her left arm around his neck and in his collar, anchoring herself to him. “Humans have lots of outdated customs about obeying husbands, ’til death do us part and all that. I made you no such promises, especially not one to haul your heavy ass out of the ocean.”

“You? _Obey_?”

They laughed together at that, him nuzzling her forehead with his own. The asari was back at the rocks while her partner floated in the water below, raucous laughter drawing Shepard's eyes beyond his shoulder. Again, they climbed, again they jumped, again they swam with the kind of vigor she no longer even truly remembered ever having. 

Garrus pulled away just slightly, a hand gently passing down her damaged upper arm to coax her attention back to him. She blinked, dripping seawater stinging her eyes, and Shepard forced a smile from her previous somber expression to try to ward him off.

“Your arm—maybe when—“ Garrus started.

A wave came, and Shepard took the chance to let him go, letting the water’s momentum carry her back towards the beach. The ocean breathed a message to her hidden amongst the crashing of the waves: _run_.

“We shouldn’t ever go back,” Garrus suggested as he set his glass down, then motioned to the asari tending bar for another round.

“Ah, vacation's seduced you,” she said with a smile. Alcohol always did make her a little looser with those, more freely given. “You spend a week somewhere and think you could stay forever. Do you think you’re the first person to have that thought?”

“But—!” He was smiling too and it was the loveliest sight to see: unburdened, happy. They’d had few enough moments like that in their lives before. “We’re in the unique position because we’re—what do you keep saying?—retired. Time to live out our golden years somewhere warm and tropical together like we planned.”

“Golden years?” The laughter came easier too, hand smacking the table as the collection of empty glasses rattled. “You’re even younger than I am.”

“What? You don’t see the fraying at the edges of my plates?” His hand swept over his brow, as if there was anything there to see. She knew that face intimately and up close, he hadn’t aged a damn day. “And don’t get me started on your younger—“

The bartender dropped off a fresh pair of drinks for each of them then removed the old. “Last call’s soon, if you need anything else.”

“She’ll be carrying me home as it is,” Garrus answered, then drew up his omni-tool to settle up the balance.

“You’re the best, Trela,” Shepard half slurred, and tipped her glass, though not without her unsteady movements spilling a third of the cup across her own thighs. “Shit, sorry, I’ve got it.”

Trela tossed her a cloth then let them be, seeing to the rest of the patrons still lingering.

“You were saying?”

“I was saying?”

“Yeah,” she sipped, throat tingling. “You think I’m only into younger men?”

“Oh—“ His brow plates furrowed, then nodded, recalling where he left off. “Facts are just facts, Shepard.”

“Well, before you,” she started, spurred on out of spite, “there was Rob. He was almost forty then, some divorced Alliance officer I met through Anderson. Adam was in N school with me, and was three years older. William was a former CO of mine—“

“Okay, okay,” he waved his hand, “I get the picture. Though now I don’t know how you resisted Kaidan back on the SR-1 since he was both an older man and Alliance, the two qualities you seem to love most. Have you ever slept with someone who _wasn’t_ military?”

“Once,” she said, the merriment lost from her voice. “On Mindoir, just the once when I was sixteen with a boy named River, a couple days before…”

Garrus tapped her glass with his own, then took a drink. Shepard did the same, a moment to honor the dead.

“And you? Who was your first?”

“Oh, I was,” his mandibles flared and clacked, shaking his head, “a _little_ older than you. I was—well, you know—nervous.”

“Garrus,” she edged her seat closer to his own, the legs scraping loudly on the floor and Trela gave her a surly glance from across the bar. She took his hand in hers solemnly, and held it to her chest over her heart. “It’s okay, you can tell me.” Then, with a feigned seriousness, “I know I was your first.”

“Shepard.”

“Don’t be embarrassed, I mean, I could tell at the time since you finished so quick. There was so much fumbling, I thought at first you just didn’t know your way around a human body, but now I realize you didn’t know your way around _any_ body.“

 _“Shepard._ ”

“We’ve all got to learn somewhere and I truly feel honored—“ She was laughing by the end of it, cheeks ruddy from the alcohol and her mirth returned. He smiled again, too. “No, relax, it wasn’t _that_ bad.”

His arm slung around her shoulders to pull her in close, nuzzling the top of her head as he let her continue, taking the teasing in a comfortable silence.

“So who was she, really?”

“Just someone in another platoon when I was… almost twenty, I think. She’d been in basic with me, though I hadn’t seen her since. I’d been too scared to start anything when we were younger, but we were older that second time we saw each other again. I’d grown a little taller, my fringe a little more filled out, and I thought _very_ highly of myself by then.”

Shepard shut her eyes, partly because the alcohol was taking effect and partly to let herself imagine the scene he painted. When they got home, she’d have to ask him to dig out some old family photos he surely had logged away somewhere, to see for herself the younger version of him he described.

“She’d gotten more beautiful, too. We were practically kids before, but by then she was… something else.”

“Mm,” she hummed, mostly to let him know she hadn’t fallen asleep. A warmth she recognized as a faint form of jealousy bloomed in her chest as she listened to him speak of someone else with such affection he usually reserved for her. They'd never talked much about their pasts, romantically speaking, but her dalliances had been just that. Nothing more, nothing sincere. It wasn't very realistic to expect he'd been the same way, it wasn't kind to wish that loneliness on someone else just to comfort herself. “Did you ever see her again?”

“A few times.” He moved beside her and helped her to her feet, their unfinished drinks abandoned on the table. Garrus’ arm slid back around her again, this time to keep her steady as they headed for the door to start the short walk back home. “I looked her up after. She had a mate and a son, just a baby when... they all died together on Palaven in the first wave.”

His somber tone alone would have woken her up, to say nothing of the chilled air. Sometimes, so lost in her own head, she often forgot the things he had endured as well. Those who had survived… they’d been bonded together by a collective trauma that would take generations to heal. Millenia, even, for the asari and krogan.

The lucky ones, some said they were. Lucky, perhaps, in some ways. Unlucky in others.

That walk had done them good by time they followed the road up to the place they’d been calling their own. It was a cliffside cottage set amongst the local trees and vines, hidden away except for where it peeked out amongst the vegetation to overlook the beach down below.

Shepard slipped off her shoes as Garrus offered a hand to balance her, then did the same with his own, though he needed no support. Rather than the bedroom, he headed for the dimly lit living room, sprawling across the couch.

It reminded her of a different couch a million light years away—well, she didn’t exactly know where the SR-2 was these days—and one of the couple of times she’d come up late to find him similarly strewn across her furniture like he’d fallen asleep but hadn’t wanted to go to bed without her, and sleeping on the couch was some compromise.

“Hmm?” Garrus ventured when she didn’t join him, his eyes heavy, bordering on sleep.

Shepard leaned in the doorway, studying him as he relaxed a little more, letting his tired body fit itself against the cushions. “I know you said it a long time ago," she paused, taking a deep breath, "do you... do you still want children?”

He shifted into a position that was only slightly more upright than horizontal. “I… don’t know.”

She nodded shallowly. She didn't know what answer she wanted to hear.

“You said it yourself—biology isn’t likely to cooperate for us. If it was possible for you and I to… do that… then yes, of course. We’d be trying to make one right now.”

That tone, that teasing little tone he sometimes had when trying to feel out if she was in the mood, brought the smallest smile to the corner of her mouth. It wasn't long to last. " _You_ still could.”

Garrus shook his head like he was expecting her words. “No.”

“There's always a surrogate.”

“Very few species outside your own use them. Even if turians did—I wouldn't, I don't want that.”

That warmth from earlier spread across her ribs yet again, even heated her cheeks as she spoke the words out loud that she didn't mean. “Then we can find someone for you to—“

 _"Don’t_.”

“I don’t want you to give that up for—for me.”

He sighed. It wasn’t just the alcohol in him. He looked weary. How long had he looked so utterly worn and she hadn’t seen it? “And I don’t want _you_ to give that up for me either. Would you honestly entertain the idea of me finding you a human man to what? Impregnate you, like you just offered me?”

Her laugh was stilted, bitter. “I doubt this body is even capable.”

“Why do you always talk like that? Like you’re disconnected from it. It’s your body. _Yours._ Not someone else’s.”

She swallowed hard over a dry throat. “Because it feels like someone else’s, I feel trapped in it. It doesn’t do the things I want it to do or the things I used to be capable of. I’d rather think of it as not my own than to realize it’s betrayed me so much, or to know the things that other people have done to it were actually done to me.” Shepard sniffed back the mucus building and let the few tears she had well at the corners of her eyes, hoping he couldn’t see them in the dark.

The drink had always made her a little more honest, too. She’d forgotten.

Her thumb rubbed against the plain band of metal around her ring finger. He'd insisted on them, a late addition to the nuptials a few days after they'd formalized it all, to keep at least one human tradition. “I just want something to be easy, to be normal for us for once in my life."

“Neither of us have had normal for a long time, we wouldn’t know what to do with it. Children, they’re not something I _need_. I need you. Forget everything else.”

“But you _want_ them. I’ve seen the way you look sometimes when you see a family together, or the way you look at me with S’rana." Every glance he'd given and every question he'd asked about the child had gnawed away at her little by little. She would never be able to give that to him, and yet he'd tied himself to her anyway. It should have been answer enough for her, but still the words tumbled out in a frenzy, as if she said them fast enough she wouldn't be able to consider what she was committing herself to. "I promise I wouldn’t be mad or jealous—I’m telling you it’s alright—I would be okay if—“

“Spirits damn it, Shepard!”

He didn’t raise his voice to her often. Shepard quieted and bit down on her tongue. Garrus sat up on the couch, his feet to the floor, and slumped forward with his elbows on his knees, head hanging.

“I’m… I’m sorry,” she finally offered after the silence had extended far too long for comfort. She wasn’t used to being the one to break first. Shepard crossed the room and sat on her knees before him, much like he had to her the day after she’d come back to him. He’d begged for her to tell him the truth even if she hadn’t managed it then, not really.

“I made a vow to you, to my _wife_ , and I won’t break it. Not for anything,” he said, his breathing heavy and measured. “Don’t ask me to do that.”

“I know. I _know_ ,” she repeated, her hand feeling the heat at the thin skin of his neck as she whispered her words into the top of his head. “I won’t ask again, I’m sorry.”

"It’s not about—“ Garrus lifted his head to regard her as he spoke. “It’s not about someone being sorry. I want you—only you—and all the good and bad that comes with it. I didn’t bind myself to you thinking that we would be able to have children together unless we looked elsewhere to adopt. I’ve always known that, and I’m okay with it.”

Words piled up in her head again, a thousand rebuttals to argue with him. _You could be a father, could have a child of your own making to raise and love if only you'd just…_ but Shepard kept those words at bay and to herself. Instead, she tugged at his shirt collar, loosening it there then grasped at the hem to tug it up.

“No—no, stop.” He caught her wrist. “What are you doing?”

“If neither of us are willing to consider the alternatives, then we ought to keep trying together then, shouldn’t we?” She fisted the fabric of his shirt tighter, but did not make any effort to remove it while he had his hand around her wrist. His tension eased, and Shepard took it for permission. He let her slip the shirt over his head.

 _Maybe Cerberus had…_ she didn’t let herself dare dream of some science fiction possibility that could actually give them the things they truly wanted. She rarely got that which she _wanted_. Garrus had been an exception to that.

“Pretend we can,” she pleaded desperately and then he worked at her own clothes while she moved in tandem to remove him of his. “Just tonight, pretend with me that we can have everything we want.”

By the third week, it didn’t feel as if they would ever go back. Some mornings they slept late missing half the day altogether, and some they woke early just to watch the sunrise and talk of all the sunrises on other planets they'd been witness to beside one another. Without even the need for her to ask, Garrus had already extended their stay not once, but twice.

Shepard leaned over from behind where he sat, and kissed his mandible. “I’m going for a run. Think about dinner while I'm gone."

He purred in reply, his attention not pulled from the datapad he was reading, lost in the book that had become his daily habit as of late. “It’s a humid one today, be careful.”

She was sticky even before the front door closed, but running—the real kind that didn’t involve pounding a treadmill on a ship or station like she’d done half her life—was a luxury not to be wasted. There was no vid screen ahead of her to give some semblance of adventure, instead the entire planet stretched ahead of her with possibility.

Shepard took an unmarked trail she’d found the week before that led her further up the hillside, a scramble of sorts up a steep climb that felt as though it climbed straight to the heavens. Her lungs burned almost as much as her thighs by time she made it to the top, a peaceful place that on some foggy days seemed as though she were lost in a cloud. A large flat rock at the summit made the perfect resting place for her tired body and her tired soul.

There were indications that others before her had found this place: the faintest wearing away of grass and other foliage on the ground, and primitive carvings on the face of the rock itself in a variety of symbols belonging to species spanning the entire galaxy. Shepard liked to imagine Liara beside her, fascinated by the small etchings to the point of missing the view stretched out before them as she traced the shapes with a finger, regaling Shepard with a tale about each and every one's origin. It had been some time since she'd spoken to her, or any one else for that matter, and Shepard knew that fault alone belonged to her. Liara had reached out to her through Garrus, and she had simply let him respond however he pleased rather than put her own voice to it. That was one of the problems with being friends with someone that dealt in secrets and information: there was no hiding, though she tried regardless.

It was moments like these, perched on a hilltop on a clear day watching the curve of the horizon, her lungs and bones aching to remind her she was _alive_ , that Shepard felt calmest. Despite everything else, the things she'd seen and done and the unpleasant ones that had been done to her in return, she was reminded she was fortunate to be here at all. She'd been meant to die twenty years earlier, but she hadn't, and the universe had tasked her with a debt in exchange. Maybe, finally, she'd paid enough to be able to wash herself clean of that debt.

The wind swept on by her, a cooling balm to her sun and sweat drenched skin, and on it she heard nothing but the whistle of the breeze. She listened for her mother's voice. It was nowhere to be found. _I can't run this_ _time_ , she swore to herself. _I won't run._

Shepard toed at the ground from where she sat, in search of a smaller, hand sized rock. With it, she set to scratching her own name beside the ones that had found this place before her. _I was here_ , her name said with every letter, _I lived._

When she'd taken her fill of that place, she made for the return trip home. That steep grade to the hill was even more exhilarating in reverse, her shoes skidding on the dirt in what was hardly more than a controlled fall. It left her breathless by time she reached the mostly flat ground again where she rejoined the main road, her pace slowed to nothing more than a walk by the end of it. Shepard's side cramped and legs ached from years far out of practice. If she kept at it hard enough, wherever they ended up settling, she could build that endurance back up. _My arm may be fucked, but my legs are good, I could still—_

Shepard hadn’t seen the human man, nor the small skycar parked in front of their rental, until she was upon the scene entirely. They'd never had a visitor before. Her brow furrowed, and then the interloper turned.

She didn’t know him straight away. His clothes were simple, ordinary like he meant to disappear into a crowd, though he was dressed far too warmly for the last couple of days indicating he wasn’t a local. Older, too, and the full grey beard didn’t help at all. He cleared his throat. _That_ she did know.

Her feet stopped her before her brain did, and they rooted her in place like grav boots had once done out in space.

“Shepard,” Steven Hackett said.

She didn’t answer, only stared without so much as a single blink. The stillness was contrary to her inside, where her heart thumped so fiercely that in her past life a sensor in her armor would have connected her directly to Chakwas, her voice a warning to calm down before she worked herself into v-tach. No. He wasn’t here. Why would he be here? He wouldn’t be here. _No._

“I apologize for—“ He seemed unsure, uneasy. That hadn’t ever been Hackett. No, it wasn’t him. Couldn’t be. “—Showing up here and disturbing you. I heard through the grapevine that congratulations were in order.”

Her stomach clenched like she was about to be sick. How had he known?

Stupid. _Stupid_. Of course he knew. She’d been stupid to think that they didn’t know exactly where she went, probably even had some fucking chip on one of her prosthetics that kept her geo tagged like a god damn endangered species being studied for science. Even more stupid to think that a marriage license issued in her name wouldn’t be flagged on a computer system somewhere.

“I—you must believe me," he said defensively, when she didn't reply. A different tactic. "I didn’t _know_.”

Her lip twitched, the words involuntary. “Bullshit.”

“What happened was ill advised. Those were decisions made far above me. They kept me in the dark, Shepard. I wouldn’t have approved of such a thing. After everything you did, you didn’t deserve that.”

Her head shook, palm raised like it could form some physical barrier between them the way she’d seen Liara do with her biotics. Shepard moved from her spot to try to skirt around his periphery and close in on the house without letting him gain any ground on her.

“Have you left the Alliance, then? Did you turn in your resignation when you heard what they did?”

Hackett had the decency to at least look ashamed.

“Get in your car and leave,” she ordered. The voice shocked even her. That was the Commander she’d been and not the shell of a woman that had shown up on Palaven. “Why are you here? You came all the way to Nevos to congratulate me on my marriage? Tell me you’re here to see that I’m alive and well, Hackett. Tell me you found out yesterday and flew halfway through the galaxy to see how you could help me, and I’ll listen to whatever you have to say.”

Hackett stood a little straighter. Even dressed down, he still had the air of a military man. He’d been an admiral ages ago, what was he now? Winning an extinction level war didn’t come without promotions and power. At least, for everyone except her.

“The new council still recognizes you as Spectre, Shepard."

She couldn’t help the laugh, nor could she control it once it loosed from her body. “Are you fucking serious?”

He stood still, a lifetime of patience at work, until she finally calmed, and moved on like nothing was amiss. Mission focused as always. “The Alliance erred, and I’m here to try to build a bridge to fix the mistakes that were made. I—we—owe that to you.”

“Those mistakes can’t be fixed.”

“Your arm,” he said with a nod of his head in its vague direction, and Shepard protectively curled her left over the bound right like it were her child, “I’ve spoken with some doctors, the best Earth has left, and they’ve seen your records. They assured me it can be fixed given the right treatment. We’ve already got an entire team standing by, waiting for you.”

It gave her pause. They’d told her there was nothing to be done for it. Had it been lies then, or was it different lies now? Why not both: deception on both accounts to coax what they wanted from her to suit their ever changing moods. Stick, or carrot. This time, Steven Hackett presented carrot.

“We’ll reinstate you,” he continued, railroading her, “and give you back command. Supply you with a ship, let you choose your crew, human or otherwise. Moreau’s still active and would be happy to be with you again.”

The rage and incredulity of moments before faded from her the longer he spoke. _Hadn’t this been what I wanted? I’d begged…_ Fight or flight, they always said. There was always a third choice, though. Accept it, and lay down and fucking die.

“And your partner, of course. He’s welcome to join you.”

Her heart lurched at that. “Don’t talk about him.”

“Just hear me out. The reapers may be gone, but I don't know if you realize, the galaxy is still not at _peace_. You’ve always been our best, Shepard, and we still have need of you yet.”

Always asking. They were always asking something of her. Shepard buried her face in her hand, dirt and sweat mingling together across her skin.

“The council has yet to appoint another human Spectre aside from you and Alenko despite our efforts. We need you to use your Spectre status to do as we always hoped it would before things got in the way: curry favor with the council, elevate humanity’s interests, secure the future. There's much that they owe you for everything you did.” He paused. “You have to keep our people safe, Shepard.”

Always that.

“Please, just…”

She didn’t hear the door, but through her fingers caught sight of the moment Hackett did, his attention leaving her for the first time since he’d made contact.

“Get the fuck away from her,” Garrus said before he was even out the door. “Don’t even look at her.”

“Garrus—“ She didn’t know what compelled her to try to defend the man across from her, only that it had been a knee jerk reaction.

“Vakarian.” Hackett shouldn’t have been surprised to find him here, and yet the man did seem unprepared for the reception.

Garrus' protective rage wasn’t wanted, only an obstacle for her to contend with. Shepard threw herself between the two of them, her back to Hackett to try to reason with her husband. “Garrus, please, _do not—"_

“You were too scared of having to face the Hierarchy by coming to Palaven for this conversation,” Shepard had her palm to his chest, a pitiful attempt at holding him off. He was stronger, bigger, and always had been able to easily overpower her. It was a testament that he did not sidestep or push her aside when he could have without any effort at all. “So you waited and followed us out here.”

“That’s not what this is,” Hackett answered. She knew him well enough to know that while he maintained an outward calm, he was rattled. He'd often sounded similar in the middle of the war. “I already told Shepard, I’m trying to make amends.”

"Leave,” he practically roared. “Before what I do starts a second war between our people.”

Shepard pushed the entirety of her body against Garrus, wrapping her arm around him. She felt the pressure of him give, easing off. Behind her, Hackett’s foot steps sounded a retreat, while the hiss of hydraulics indicated the opening of a skycar door.

“The offer stands, _Commander_ ,” Hackett said, and with that, he was gone.

Tears didn’t come. She wasn’t sure if her body was even capable of them anymore. Garrus held her in the circle of his arms and it reminded her of the way he’d kept her close after they’d promised themselves to one another. His arms felt like her fortress.

“Are you alright?” Garrus asked after some time.

_I’ve never been alright._

“Fine,” she said, shaking her head to clear the infiltrating thoughts.

“What did he say to you?”

Shepard pulled away and led the two of them back inside. She didn’t bother with the ritual of toeing off her shoes, instead carelessly tracking mud as she went. “He said they could fix my arm. That I was still technically a Spectre, and that they wanted me back.”

Garrus guffawed. It was the wrong reaction.

“Is that so hard to believe?” She bit, her anger misguided. “That I could ever be of some use again?”

“That’s not—“ he sighed and followed her to the kitchen where she stuck her head under the sink’s running faucet, rinsing the scum from her face. “You are one of the best soldiers they’ve ever had, I’ve no doubt about that. But the Alliance… why now? Why force you out only to ask you back? There’s more to it.”

Shepard groped the counter for the nearby towel to dry herself. The ice cold water hadn’t cleared her head like she’d hoped. “Of course there is. They’ll always need someone to do their dirty work and my hands are already fucking dirty.”

“You’re not considering it are you? I mean, after…”

Her fingers gripped the towel tight, her knuckles gone white. “You don’t have a damn clue, so don’t presume to know what did or didn’t happen.”

The plates around his eyes narrowed. “That’s by your design, Shepard. You’ve kept me out.”

“It’s none of your business.”

He was smart enough not to corner her and kept his distance. “Are you kidding? I’m your—“

"Just because I signed some document doesn’t mean you get the right to know everything about me. You don’t own me. You don’t make my choices.” Where was her mother’s guiding voice telling her to run? Only her own voice was present within her now, and it screamed, clawed at her from the inside out. _Just stop. Stop before it’s too late._

“Don’t put words in my mouth.”

Shepard tossed the towel in his direction like she meant for it to go through him. He didn’t bother to catch it. “Just stay out of it. It has nothing to do with you.”

“If you want to find someone to look at your arm, I’ll take you across this entire galaxy to do it. If you want to go back to the council as a Spectre, _independent_ from the Alliance and as your own woman, I’ll take you there myself and serve beside you. But do not trust the Alliance again, Shepard. They’ve shown you who they are. When someone shows you who they are, believe it.”

Her eyes shut and a deep breath passed in and out of her. He was right about that, at least. “I’m not going back to the Alliance,” she finally said.

Garrus sagged forward, elbows to the countertop as he held his head In his hands. His body shuttered in what she assumed was relief. She gave him a moment, then approached even if she wasn’t sure she would be welcomed, and set her hand to the back of his carapace. He didn’t shove her off.

“Outside, you said something about the Alliance and the Hierarchy. What did you mean?”

He didn’t answer right away, and just as she’d given up, her fingers about to pay their goodbye to him, Garrus started speaking. Slow, methodical. A soldier’s account.

“I told the rest of the crew what I’d seen when the Alliance had finally given me access to you. There were differing opinions on what was going on. Some thought it was suspicious, but didn’t think you were in danger. A few thought it was just the Alliance taking care of you. Others knew something was wrong, but didn’t know what we could do except wait it out. You don’t know what it was like right after the war… it was chaos. Everyone scattered to try to put the worlds back together as best we could. Tali returned to what was left of the fleet, Liara back to try to reestablish her network of connections. Wrex was already a father by then. Kaidan... well, you understand.”

She hadn’t ever thought about what life would be like if they’d been able to beat back the reapers once and for all and live to talk about it on the other side. It had all seemed so unlikely for so long… that it hadn’t seemed worth the energy to mull it over. They’d all had places to be, families to find or mourn, homes to rebuild. Her family had been dead for so long and she’d never returned to the one place that had truly been her home. There would have been nothing waiting for her in the aftermath with her mission fulfilled.

“I couldn’t let it go, though. I couldn’t just leave and pretend it would work itself out. They didn’t see you, didn’t see your face. Maybe you’ll tell me I’m a fool and disagree with me, but no one knows you like I do. I know your face, I can read it from a mile away across a battlefield. Sometimes you think you’re hiding it all under a mask, and maybe it works on everyone else, but I know _you.”_

 _What does he see right now?_ She’d always thought she’d been pulling the wool over his eyes like she’d done to the rest of the world, but had he just known when not to pursue? He’d tried here and there to push her buttons; had it been done calculated and careful in an attempt to draw her out? No, he was wrong. _No one knows me really, he only thinks he does.  
_

"When I returned to Palaven, I went straight to Victus. I told him the Alliance was engaged in something with you. I didn’t know what, but I knew it wasn’t good. He asked for proof, and of course I didn’t have anything, just a gut feeling, but my life has been ruled by gut feelings. I told him I would assemble a group myself and try to go after you—however stupid that would have been—but he begged me not to. He said we couldn’t risk starting a war with humanity again. Our people and our military, what was left of them both, wouldn’t support it, not after everything we’d already lost, certainly not without proof, and not for… not for a human.”

His shoulders sunk in shame.

“He did get in contact with Alliance command to feel them out, but they just told him you were badly injured and had an extensive recovery ahead of you, like they'd told to all of us. He knew it was bullshit straight away, and though he couldn’t do anything outwardly retaliatory, he pulled much of our aid back under the guise of simply helping our own rebuilding efforts. The Hierarchy hasn’t been very welcoming of the Alliance since, and they’ve wisely stayed away. Showing up on Palaven to seek you out wouldn’t have gone unnoticed. He offered me that job afterwards, I think mostly to keep an eye on me to make sure I didn’t go after you anyway.”

Her fingers pulled at him, forcing him to stand up and face her. Garrus’ face was stricken, solemn and pale. She’d seen it before when she’d passed him into Liara’s arms in London and left him behind. Or rather, depending on one’s perspective, ordered him to leave her behind. It had broken her heart then, and it broke it again now. Shepard set her hand to his neck, thumb splayed over the scarred and ruined mandible.

“Thank you.”

His head went to shake dismissively, but she held him steady so he couldn’t. “Don’t thank me. I didn’t do anything.”

“You didn’t give up hope.”

He had no response for her, just steady even breathing as she stared into his eyes. They’d always been so blue.

"Will you finally tell me what happened?” Garrus asked. A gamble.

Her grip on him flexed and tightened just slightly. She’d been wrong earlier. There’d been something waiting for her in the end, hadn’t there? Garrus had waited.

“Yes,” she answered, “but not today.”

Hunger pangs woke her later that night, long after they’d gone to bed beside one another. Garrus slept on, undisturbed by her shifting weight on the mattress or foot steps across the bedroom. She was on her way to the kitchen when the sound of the ocean whispered in through a half open window in the living room, and Shepard stopped.

Come morning, they’d finally be leaving this place. Whatever magic the planet had held for them had burned out the moment Steven Hackett had shown his face.

Light reflected off the moon, illuminating the ocean and those hulking behemoths of rock that stood off shore, the same ones she’d seen others climbing day in and day out. A large wave crashed into one, the water churning and frothy. Shepard watched, captivated by the unending display of raw power and terrifying vastness the ocean offered. Had the reapers succeeded as they’d intended, the inhabitants of this planet would have been burned to ash, the memories of their civilizations all but destroyed. And yet, the ocean would have remained, teeming with lower life forms who called it home, the waves rolling in, the waves rolling out. Shepard watched, lost in it, and then just as suddenly as she had paused to absorb it, she turned and headed out the front door.

Bare feet carried her in the direction of the sound of water, rocks and roots digging uncomfortably in to her soles but giving her no reason to stop, a woman half possessed. Soft, dry sand replaced dirt, and then it was wet, cold sand between her toes. A wave swept in when she was thigh deep and though it pushed her back, she didn’t allow it to halt her progress. Shepard barreled through it and then dove in as she hadn’t done since she was a teenager.

She struggled against the tide and herself, desperately trying to remain afloat with only one arm to help. Every instinct called for her to use the other, and when it didn’t listen, she tried to compensate by doubling down on the left. It worked for a time, but it wasn’t efficient, and every time she drew her head up out of the water for air, she was tossed off balance despite the furious kicking of her legs, nearly swallowing down a mouthful of seawater in the process. Shepard pushed, unrelenting, but the waves were stronger that night than she’d felt in all the days before, and when she stopped to take a moment to breathe while treading water, the rocks seemed no closer. Droplets of water peppered her cheeks, reminiscent of tears.

Shepard couldn’t afford to wait there long, not with every minute gone pushing her farther and farther back towards the beach, and so she tried a different strategy, this time floating to her back and letting her left arm swing up, over, and back. She couldn’t see ahead of her this way, but if she kept an eye on the moon and a particular tree back on the mainland, she was relatively certain she could manage to not widely miss her mark.

It wasn’t easy this way, not like it might have been for her years ago, but even as her chest heaved with every oxygen starved breath, she knew it would work. The sound of the water changed as she got close, the crashing of waves louder and louder as they collided into the rock, spraying her with a fine mist. Shepard rolled back to her front and was back at it like she’d started, only now she had to contend with fighting the oncoming waves that would be trying to simultaneously toss her away and also into another nearby rock that was not her intended target. She’d have to time it just right and save her strength for that push.

It took three tries to get it right before her fingers found purchase on the stone, grasping a handhold good enough that her skin didn’t slip against the slime and algae built up in the crevices. With all her strength that remained, she wrenched her body forward, catching her feet likewise on part of the rock below the surface of the water. She knew from watching the others that there was a flattened little step on a part of the rock that provided a bit of a boost up, but she was disoriented now with only the moon to guide her, and would have to do with whatever side of the rock she’d ended up on.

Shepard looked up.

_It hadn't seemed so high from the beach._

The way up was almost an entirely vertical face, but with a number of dips into the rock providing for easy placement for feet or hands. Shepard stretched, testing a few options until she found a sweet spot, and then she repeated the motion with her first foot, and the second, a few easy motions to build confidence.

But all the confidence in the world wouldn’t have made the journey any less difficult. She tried to release her hand to reach for a new, higher grip, but it left her untethered, nearly falling back as her center of gravity shifted. Quickly, she returned for the safe handhold, clutching her body back to the rock. The fingers of her right arm, half numb and without their former strength, gripped blindly at the wall of stone from where it, as always, remained slung tight to her body.

She tried again, this time with her right hand's pinky and ring finger wedged into a small crack. It wouldn’t hold for long, but if it gave her even half a second before she started to fall backwards, she could make it. She was sure.

The pain in her right hand burned so red hot she screamed as she made the move. It poured out from somewhere deep inside her, cutting through the night like a knife, and the sheer force of it felt as though it lightened her, propelling her upward. Her body smacked hard against the rock itself, the jagged edges—the ones higher up that hadn’t had thousands of years of waves rubbing them smooth—cutting into her flesh. Shepard jerked her right shoulder as best she could along with a shift of her feet, and yanked forcefully at her right hand, another scream finding her as the fingers, bloody and half crushed, pulled free of where she’d forced them.

Shepard glanced up once more. She felt utterly spent, and yet was still over a body’s length from the top. Silent tears wept from her openly as she looked for her next step, finding a similar fissure to the first, and she tried to repeat what had worked earlier. Only now, she could hardly bend the fingers she had used before, and the blood on them left any potential friction compromised. The pain flared anew there, with even just each gust of wind that kissed over the skin of her swelling fingers a fresh agony.

 _I don't need it_ , she told herself, and instead raised her right foot to a higher step. With a desperate recklessness, she lunged, fingers scrambling to grasp the higher ledge. Just when she was confident she had it, her right foot slipped and it triggered a cascade of failures. Her weight pulled lopsided to the left side of her body while the right side swung violently out, and she couldn’t hold on, not for anything.

Gravity claimed her and she hadn’t the foresight to try to push off the rock before it was happening, leaving the entirety of her left side scraping against the rock as she fell towards the water. Her lungs were near empty when she slipped underneath, and without the sun shining on the surface to guide her, there was no telling up from down, death from life. The salt water burned every open wound on her and she kicked helplessly, left arm flailing, the last vestiges of air she had left bubbling out of her as she fought her way up.

She didn’t remember the first breath she took after breaching the surface, didn’t even remember the final few feet she swam back up or how she’d managed it at all, only that somehow she had. She had, or the alternative would’ve been her lifeless body whisked out to sea or carried to the shore for someone to find come first light. But she wasn’t dead, she was very much alive. Again.

Shepard clawed at the sand when she reached the shoreline, crawling as she coughed up the seawater that had found its way into her belly and her lungs. Her stomach emptied itself, muscles clenching as she retched again, again, again, until there was nothing left inside of her but the vacuum of empty space. Water lapped at her knees as a large wave came in, and Shepard barely had the strength to drag herself further up, lest she be pulled back in to the water by some force that regretted letting her escape at all. 

The coughing returned, her throat raw, and Shepard curled forward over her knees, sobbing with only the moon to bear witness. Her open palm beat into the sand as she cried louder, body cycling through shuddering and gagging. That grief went rabid not long after, and Shepard was screaming again, just as she’d done back on that rock, though this time it wasn’t the physical pain that egged it on.

When there was nothing left in her, not an ounce of rage or grief or any emotion at all, Shepard lay on her back, gasping as she watched the stars above. She might have laid there for days for all she knew, her mind lost to call of the void. The scent of blood hung in the air, and Steven Hackett's voice crackled in her ear: _Shepard_. _Commander._ In an instant, Nevos was gone from beneath her. Shepard's head lolled to the side, expecting to find the still warm corpse of David Anderson, but a bird cooed in the distance and it hurtled her back through time and space to a tropical planet on a honeymoon she never thought to have. The metallic scent of blood here was only hers.

Shepard stumbled to her feet. There wasn’t a part of her body that didn't feel every already purpling bruise and scrape of flesh the rock had claimed from her. Sand had caked itself into each scab that was already forming, the soles of her feet worn bloody as she limped her way up the hill. The door was unlocked just as she'd left it, and the house as still as it had been, though this time she didn’t have the energy to spare in keeping quiet.

She tore the clothes from her body as she made her way to the bedroom, ripping the sling from her arm and shoulder in the process until finally her right arm hung limp and free, and crawled into the bed, blood and sand and salt water and all.

Garrus lifted his head, still mostly asleep. When he swung his arm over to pull her close and felt the bare skin and all that she’d brought back with her, he jerked to attention.

“Shepard? Spirits, what—“

She grasped his arm before he could pull himself away. “I’m fine,” she said. “Go back to sleep."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Putting this chapter together reminded me why I used to write an entire story before posting it. There are a lot of huge structural changes I would make, but I've committed to this version, so hopefully it ends up pulling together in the end.


End file.
